


The Grimm Affair

by Shepherd23



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tales, Gen, Nursery Rhymes, Swanfire/Thursday Next-AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-21
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2018-09-10 21:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 73,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8940382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shepherd23/pseuds/Shepherd23
Summary: (Swanfire/Thursday Next AU) In another 1983, a laboratory accident opened a rift to the Enchanted Forest. For thirty years, many such Persons of Dubious Reality (PDRs) have lived in a protected town in Maine, designated for their use and kept separate from the rest of the world, except for when their written lives dictate a predisposition to trouble, in which case it is the job of the underfunded Nursery Crime Division to wrangle them. Officer Emma Swan has worked in the NCD since leaving the Union Army ten years ago – being a PDR herself, she’s somewhat uniquely qualified for the job. But she might have her hands full when Peter Pan starts kidnapping fairytale characters; not to mention that she also has to find time to halt the American Civil War, figure out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and persuade the man she still loves not to marry another woman.





	1. A Cautionary Tale

"The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle all policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialised to be tackled by the regular force. There are thirty departments in all, starting at the relatively mundane Neighbourly Disputes (SO-30), Literary Crime (SO-27), Nursery Crime (SO-25) and Art Crime (SO-24), and going on to the Pasta Police (SO-21). While anything below SO-20 is considered ‘restricted information for reasons of national security’, it is common knowledge the ChronoGuard is SO-12 and the Antiterrorism Squad is SO-9, and rumoured that SO-1 is the department that polices the SpecOps themselves. What the rest of them do is anybody’s guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are mostly ex-military or ex-police and universally unbalanced. As the saying goes, “If you want to be in the SpecOps, act kinda weird …”

Sidney Glass, _A Short History of the Special Operations Network_

 

You could say that I was born to be a Nursery Crime Detective. Well, in truth, I was born to be a princess, but a freak accident on the day of my birth ripped me, my parents and most of their kingdom away from the Enchanted Forest and dumped us here, in the Real World. Nobody is really sure as to who’s at fault. See, on the day it happened, a couple of lab mice broke containment, spilt a load of perchloroethylene onto a banana that got eaten by a technician who happened to be reading the Grimm Brothers’ assorted fairy tales while babysitting a zero-point-energy containment unit. At the same time, the Evil Queen was getting ready to cast a horrible curse over the Enchanted Forest – so it might have been the techie’s fault, or it might have been the Queen’s. It might have been both. Either way, you can imagine the technician’s shock at finding her inside the unit.

That was thirty-three years ago, and since then nearly four thousand Persons of Dubious Reality (or PDRs – a committee formed in 1984 agreed on the term after a unanimous vote that ‘Fairy Tale Character’, quite frankly, _sucked_ ) have found their way across from the Enchanted Forest to the Real World. Most of them now live in a small town in Maine (called Storybrooke, of course) to keep their weirdness separate from ‘normal people’. Part of my job is to help round up the rest.

Which is how I ended up spending the night of my thirty-third birthday in a backyard in Milton, munching on a sandwich while my superior officer relayed orders through a radio to our backup on the street.

“We used to call this neighbourhood Cautionary Valley back in the day,” said DCI Jack Spratt once he was done on the radio. Like me, he was a PDR who lived outside of Storybrooke. See, there are some – like Jack and me – who can blend in because we don’t have any outward peculiarities that mark us _distinctly_ as PDRs. Meaning we don’t have any extra limbs, or hoard spoons, or (like an ex I prefer _not_ to think about) turn into flying monkeys at inopportune moments. Don’t get me wrong, not _all_ PDRs are crazy, or even dangerous. Actually, the most annoying thing about it is that you get treated like walking tourist attraction once you come out of the nursery, so to speak. It’s one of the reasons that so many PDRs are happy to live in Storybrooke – _everyone_ there is a PDR, so it’s nothing special at all.

“Did you ever meet a Cautionary Valley child?”

“No.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “Sickeningly polite. A credit to their parents. Well mannered, helpful, courteous. We tried to arrest the Scissor-man in ninety-six but got overruled by the local residents’ committee. They said that they wanted to _use_ the cautionaries lurking in the woodwork and pursued a policy of ‘cautionary acquiescence’ by propagating the stories. Then their kids never had cause to invoke the cautionaries at all.”

The Great Long Red-Legged Scissor-man was one of those PDRs whose unfortunate writing means that they are virtually uncontrollable and unfit to live in ordinary neighbourhoods. His escape from NCD custody fifteen years ago sparked a state-wide manhunt along a trail of snipped-off thumbs and burnt-down houses, but he was always one giant stride ahead of us. Hopefully, until now.

“Did it work?”

“’Course it bloody did. Once the hands really _do_ grab your ankles when you get out of bed, or the troll up the chimney really _does_ try to nab you when you don’t eat your greens, you make damn sure to do everything your parents tell you.”

The thing is, I wouldn’t know. I didn’t get the chance to grow up with my parents.

Before I could get into some depressive reminiscing, Jack’s radio clicked twice, and he slapped me on the shoulder. “Right. Let’s get this over with.”

 

“So this is how it’s going to go,” I told Danny’s parents over the kitchen table. Mr and Mrs Petersen were pleasant enough, but certainly anxious – a quick look at Mr Petersen’s thumbless hand told me everything that I needed to know. “You two will turn your backs at 23.30 for Danny to start sucking his thumb. At the same time, he’ll need to lean back on his chair, refuse to eat his broccoli and play with these matches. I’ll be in the closet with the radio, so if we can’t grab the Scissor-man before he reaches the house, I’ll give the ‘thumbs-out’ order and Danny aborts all action. Do you understand?”

The Hoffmans looked at each other and then at Danny, who (at seventeen-and-a-half) was old enough to understand the risks. Like all of the kids in Cautionary Valley, he had lived in a condition of understated terror for so long that he barely noticed anymore.

“We’re happy to go ahead, Officer,” said Mr Petersen. “There are methods other than terror to instil discipline. We want to be like normal families, with surly teenagers and untied shoelaces, messy rooms, homework left until the last minute and unanswered calls to the dinner table.”

He sighed, and I turned to his son. “Danny? Are you happy to go ahead?”

The kid nodded enthusiastically. “Of course, Officer Swan, if it is for the good of everyone. Would anyone like a sandwich, or a cup of tea?”

“No, Danny,” his mother reminded him sternly. “There’ll be no more tea-making for you after tonight.”

“Are you sure? I could bake a cake – and then play the piano for your entertainment before taking the dog for a walk and repainting the spare room.”

Even I had to admit that this was creepy. I didn’t have any kids of my own – unless you count a collection of ex-boyfriends, some of whom definitely had yet to make it out of puberty – but I was pretty sure that they were meant to be a bit more than mindless automatons.

“I still don’t exactly understand this _Scissor-man,_ ” said Mrs Petersen, who wasn’t from Cautionary Valley and so – understandably – found the whole concept of fairy tales and nursery rhymes made from flesh and blood to be, well, _strange._

“He’s what’s called a PDR – a Person of Dubious Reality,” I explained, as I had done countless times before. “Someone who was sucked into this world from the Enchanted Forest. They’re hard-wired to act in repetitive, predictable ways and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Cautionary tales are particularly mindless. They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done – they really just don’t know any better.”

“Are you sure the NCD is up to the task?” Mrs Petersen added, voicing an all-too-familiar suspicion within the community that the regular force wasn’t taking their concerns seriously.

“Of course,” I said proudly. Okay, so a lot of it was thankless grunt work, and there are days where I hate my job – but NCD is where I belong. “Two months ago, we successfully detained a ghoulie, a ghostie and a long-legged beastie in Eastport.”

“And the bump in the night?” asked Mr Petersen. “What about that?”

“Ah. Well, the bump got away – but you gotta admit, a seventy-five percent success rate in that particular operation was a good result.”

 

At 20.25, I signalled Jack and Constable Baker and kept careful count of the seconds as I climbed into the closet, shut the door to little more than a crack and waited for the Petersens to begin the routine we had rehearsed across town at McDonald’s (where the Scissor-man _never_ attacked). Mr Petersen, in an overly dramatic fashion, said:

“We’re going to leave you here to finish your greens on your own, Danny. _Don’t_ play with my matches, _don’t_ lean back on your chair and don’t you _dare_ suck your thumb when our backs are turned!”

I watched them walk out of the kitchen with a backwards glance at my hiding spot and shut the door behind them. Danny was now alone, staring at his thumb with fascination. Poor kid – he’d never even contemplated sucking it. With his father’s hand the way it was, I couldn’t blame him. He paused, thumb outstretched, and looked to me. I gave him what I hoped was a confident nod – if we wanted to catch the Scissor-man, then this was our best shot. Danny waved for another few seconds before he opened his mouth and began to suck on his thumb. Then he leant back on his chair, idly struck a match and said petulantly around a mouthful of thumb: “I don’t _want_ to eat my broccoli!”

Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen. I was starting to get kinda uncomfortable lodged in the cupboard – though Danny was having the time of his life with those matches – and jumped when Jack’s voice came over the radio.

“Emma, is Danny still sucking his thumb?”

“Affirmative,” I told him. I stuck my own hand out of the cupboard to give Danny a thumbs-up when he looked worried, and waited another minute. Then I had a thought.

“Jack, when _was_ the last cautionary-related crime?”

There was static for a minute, some beeps – probably from Constable Baker sitting on his radio – and then Jack’s voice came back on. “Uh, one five-day accelerated starvation due to soup refusal, ninth of July 1997. Single thumbectomy on twenty-three December 1998. Fatal house fire, twenty-six March 2001, might have been matchplay-related, but never proved.”

“So it’s been almost twenty years since the last _definite_ scissoring?” I turned my mike off so Jack wouldn’t hear me sigh. “Did we ever consider the possibility that he might have _retired_?”

“You mean Cautionary Valley has been living in terror all this time for nothing?” asked DS Harrow, an exceptionally tall woman who was hidden behind a spruce in the neighbour’s yard. “I’d be more than a little pissed off if that was the case.”

“It’s a possibility,” Jack replied, “but I’m not ruling anything out. I say we give it another half-hour, then abort and go away for a rethink. The boss man’s gonna give me an earful about overtime anyway.”

“Alright,” I said, which was then echoed by the rest of the team. I shifted around to try and get comfortable. It looked like we were in for a long night and I watched my watch, willing the hands to move faster so that I could get home – my mom was probably trying to call me to say happy birthday, and would _not_ be at all impressed that I had spent my birthday crammed inside a closet – but the door swung shut, and there was a soft click.

“Oh, crap.” I shoved the door, but it was stuck fast. _Double-crap._ “Uh, Jack?” I called over the radio, trying not to sound too embarrassed. “I just locked myself in the closet and I can’t get out. Can we abort now?”

“No.” Even over the radio, Jack’s voice was unnaturally quiet and I realised that he was whispering. “You feel that?”

Swallowing a load of panic at being locked inside a closet with a psychopath on the loose, I put the radio down and stayed still until I felt it. Like a cold breeze on my bones, the whole world seemed to go silent – PDRs can feel the presence of others, somehow, and right then I could feel a very dangerous one, very nearby.

“He’s here,” Jack whispered again. “Stay put – I’m coming.”

I shivered as the cold emitting from the Scissor-man’s presence bit into my arms again, and I regretted not bringing my jacket with me. Not being able to see the kitchen was agony – I heard the door open and heavy boots thump on the floor, followed by a yelp and a _whoosh_ and the smell of extinguishing foam, then somebody flicked the closet lock and I almost punched Jack in the nose.

“Easy,” he said, raising the fire extinguisher to protect his face. To Danny – who had stopped sucking his thumb in a panic when the matches had burnt a hole in the kitchen table – he barked, “The thumb – back in!”

Danny – bless his poor, tortured soul – obediently did as he was asked. No sooner was his thumb back in his mouth when the back door flung violently open, and before Jack and I could blink, a wild-eyed figure in crimson trousers leapt in, brandishing a giant pair of gold scissors. With expert precision worthy of a trained barber, the tips of the scissors closed around Danny’s thumb and would have doubtless snipped it off had Jack not shouted:

“HOLD IT!”

The Scissor-man froze. His bloodshot eyes met mine, then jumped to Jack, with a mixture of fear and insanity. He was paler than the pictures I’d seen, with an untidy shock of electrocuted white hair and a tailor’s tape measure hung from the pocket of his bottle-green jacket. I really didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him or not – on the one hand, he was only doing what he had been essentially programmed to do. On the other, he was armed with giant scissors, so maybe I didn’t feel so sorry for him after all.

“DCI Spratt,” Jack continued, holding up his ID. “Nursery Crime Division. You’re under arrest – STEP AWAY FROM THE THUMB!”

“Snip!” snarled the Scissor-man, a wild grin revealing several rotten teeth as he twitched and his long, bony fingers clasped the scissors even tighter. I tried to shoot Danny a reassuring smile while trying _not_ to notice how white the flesh at the base of his thumb – where the scissors gripped it tight. The slightest amount of pressure would take it clean off.

“This isn’t a joke,” Jack said slowly in his best authoritarian voice. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I felt the urge to laugh – I’m sorry, but Jack as an authoritarian is ridiculous. It took him six months to house-train his dog. “Drop the scissors. We can plea-bargain this down to possession of an offensive weapon.”

In reply, the Scissor-man made a wild _snip_ in Jack’s direction, then swiftly returned the scissors to Danny’s thumb. The whole movement took less than a second, and I didn’t even realise what had happened until Jack’s tie flopped to the floor like a puppet snake. I kept my forefinger firmly fixed on the transmit button of my radio, keeping the rest of the team informed while – hopefully – they initiated phase two of this op. If this came down to a fight, Jack and I were in serious trouble.

But then the floodlights came on in the garden, and I let out a long breath of relief. The Scissor-man screeched in shock and rage. Outside, six _more_ children waved at him with their thumbs in their mouths.

 _Time to act,_ I thought about a second after I had already jammed my radio between the blades, grabbed the handles and Jack shoved Danny out of harm’s way. The Scissor-man, momentarily distracted by the arrival of more thumb-sucking children (who were also making faces at him), baulked and attempted to run, only to find that I had hold of the scissors as well. This was my part of the job – Jack directed the thing, Charlie Baker came up with the brilliant plans, and I tackled the bad guy. I was a bit more used to guns and swords than I was scissors – but I still managed to get him on the ground (with some help from a well-aimed backhand from Gretel Harrow) and wrest the offending weaponry out of his hands.

“Right,” Jack declared, picking up the scissors and tossing them well out of the Scissor-man’s reach while Gretel and I held him down. “I’ll toss you for who gets to put the cuffs on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my 'I-need-a-break-from-writing-other-stuff' story written at the request of Anonymousnerdgirl and ml101, so expect irregular updates unless enough people ask me for one ;) (That number is less than two)  
> This will more or less follow the plot of Jasper Fforde's 'The Eyre Affair' with minimal surprises


	2. SpecOps is Family Business

‘The Newcastle Paranormal Scale was designed by SO-4 ( _Weird_ Stuff) as a means of quantifying the risk factors associated with the paranormal, supernatural and otherwise unusual things that aren’t well understood by the general public. A special amendment was made for werewolves in 2003 when they were demoted from an NPS-1 ( _If encountered, pray to God_ ) to an NPS-1A ( _Dangerous at specified times – otherwise safe for human company_ ). There are some humans who feel miffed at the fact that they come in below garden fairies on the scale (NPS-5: _Might curse if insulted_ ), but when they complain they usually get told that at least they outrank bridge trolls (NPS-7: _Not intelligent enough to bother with_ ). Humans currently sit on an NPS-6 ( _Mostly harmless_ ), amended in 1990 from the original definition ( _Harmless_ ).’ 

\- article in _The Owl,_ 16 July 2007

 

I finally got home around eleven o’clock, after we managed to wrangle the Scissor-man into overnight custody and endured a half-hour lecture from Superintendent Briggs about unnecessary overtime and the use of children as bait (never mind that we’d gotten the o-kay on the job over a week ago). I checked my phone – eleven missed calls from my mom, and one from my brother. I figured they would both be asleep by now, but with an hour left of my birthday, I figured I might as well do _something_ significant. So I went to the fridge, picked out the muffin that I’d forgotten to eat for lunch and turned on the TV.

“This is the Toad News Network,” boomed the announcer over swirling network music. “The Toad, bringing you News Global, News Updates, News Now!”

I picked at the muffin while the lights came up on an attractive blonde newswoman.

“Late-night news on Sunday, October twenty-third, 2016, and this is Felicity Burbage reading it. The Mississippi River,” she announced, staring straight into the camera with that stupid fake grin, “has again come under scrutiny this week as the United Nations passed resolution PN17289, insisting that the Union and the Confederacy open negotiations regarding sovereignty. As the American Civil War is about to enter its one hundred and fifty-sixth year, pressure groups on both sides of the border are pushing for a peaceful end to the hostilities.”

I groaned and shut my eyes. Ten years ago, I’d been out there, doing my ‘patriotic duty’ for the Union and seen the truth of the warfare for myself. Pomp and glory – ha, more like heat, cold, fear and death. And artillery fire. That never goes away.

“When the Union forces reclaimed the state of Kentucky from the Confederates in 2005, it was seen as a major triumph against overwhelming odds. However, a state of deadlock has since been maintained on Fort Donelson and the country’s mood was summed up by MP Gordon Randolph-Grant at an anti-war rally at Times Square.”

The program cut to footage of a large crowd in central New York. Randolph-Grant was standing on a podium and giving a speech in front of an untidy nest of microphones.

“What began as an effort to protect the Constitution in 1861,” said the MP, “has since collapsed into nothing more than a fruitless exercise to maintain the pride of those on both sides …”

I shut the TV off. I’d heard it all before, and it made me want to punch something. Last week, they’d shown footage from the barricades at Fort Donelson, and I broke my toaster in a fit of rage. Every time I saw those pictures, the smell of cordite and the crack of exploding shells filled my head. I instinctively stroked the only outward mark from the campaign that I had – a small raised scar on my chin. Others – some of whom had been good friends – hadn’t been so lucky. And yet nothing had changed, and the war had trundled on.

I continued to chew non-committedly on the muffin until I noticed that my apartment had gone quiet – the microwave was firmly fixed at 11.27 and eight seconds, the clock had stopped ticking, and I couldn’t hear Mrs Cuse snoring next door. All sound halted too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum as all the noise in the world was paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume. This had happened before, and it always made me smile.

“Hi, Dad,” I said, getting up off the sofa to give my father – who had appeared in my kitchen as he had plenty of times before – a hug.

“How’s my favourite daughter?”

“Ha. Funny, Dad – I’m your only daughter. Unless you and Mom have some news for me.”

My dad, the former king, was a colonel in the ChronoGuard – or at least he was, until his timekeeping buddies raided my mom’s house with a Seize&Eradication order open-dated at both ends and demanded to know where he was. We’d just thought that he was late for Thanksgiving dinner. Basically, he went rogue, so the ChronoGuard had him eradicated – a simple delay of medical intervention after his transference from the Enchanted Forest (because Dad had apparently been stabbed right before the rift, though neither of my parents had ever seen fit to tell me how or why) got the job done. He technically doesn’t exist, and most people think my brother and I were born on the wrong side of the sheets, so to speak. I don’t even know Dad’s real name – Colonel Nolan is all the ChronoGuard ever call him. I don’t really care, though – to me, he’s just Dad.

Since then, Dad had remained at liberty, dropping by to visit me, Mom and Jesse whenever he could steal a few seconds. He said that he now regarded the whole service as ‘morally and historically corrupt’ and was, as such, fighting a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office for Special Temporal Stability. I didn’t have any idea what he meant by that and only got confused when he tried to explain it. I just hoped that he knew what he was doing and that I’d still get to see him from time to time.

“Happy birthday, sweetpea,” he said, holding me at arm’s lengths to look at me.

“And here I thought you’d forgotten.”

He chuckled. “One of the advantages of time-travel – even if I did, I could just pop back to your birthday and pretend I hadn’t. So how are you?”

“I’m good. What about you?”

“Can’t complain. Time is a fine physician.”

“Y’know, I think you’re looking younger every time I see you.”

“I am. Any grandchildren in the offing?”

It was my turn to snort. “The way I’m going? Not ever.”

My dad smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I wouldn’t say that quite yet. Here.” He handed me a Woolworths bag. “I came here from ’75. Got this for you.”

Inside the bag was a single by the Beatles. I didn’t recognise the title.

“Didn’t they split up in ’70?”

“Not always. What have you been up to?” he asked, taking a seat on the sofa. I sat down next to him.

“Same as always. Runaway lunatics, boogeymen under the beds –”

“– same old shit?”

“Yup.” I nodded. “Same old shit.”

Dad grinned. “I went to see your mom a couple weeks ahead, your time,” he said, consulting the large chronograph that covered his right forearm. “Just the usual – ahem – reason. She’s going to paint the bedroom cherry red in a week – any chance you could dissuade her? It doesn’t match the curtains.”

“How is she?”

He grinned and bopped me on the nose. “You could just call her. You know how she worries when you don’t pick up the phone.”

I remembered the eleven missed calls and smiled sheepishly. Dad was right – I love my mom to pieces but I don’t get home nearly often enough.

It was never easy with my parents. I only met them for the first time when I was almost eighteen. In the accidental rift that tore all of us out of the Enchanted Forest, I was somehow separated from them and found on a highway outside of Rockland. In the intervening chaos, an abandoned baby was somehow overlooked and I ended up spending sixteen years in the foster system. I do wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up with them in their world, going to balls, learning to ride a horse, wearing fancy dresses and tiaras and meeting handsome princes.

Frankly, I think I’d rather be a police officer.

 “Maybe you should come home for a bit,” Dad suggested. “Might be a good idea. You take your work far too seriously.”

“That’s rich, Dad, coming from you.”

He feigned a heart attack and chuckled. “Okay, I deserved that. How’s your history?”

“Okay.”

“Do you know how Ulysses Grant died?”

“Uh –” I thought for a moment because the name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Then I thought back to a history lecturer I’d had in the Union Army and remembered. “If I remember correctly, he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma in Texas. Why?”

“Might be those blasted Confederate revisionists again,” Dad muttered while scribbling in a notebook. “Trying to fix things so that the Union loses the Vicksburg campaign and the Confederacy maintains control of the Mississippi.”

“But the Union won the Vicksburg campaign.”

“I never said they were any good at it.”

This is what I meant when I said that my dad could be confusing sometimes, as I tried to connect some obscure Ohioan quartermaster to a Union victory at Vicksburg.

“Dad, that’s ridiculous,” I said. “I suppose you reckon the same revisionists had Abe Lincoln shot in 1864.”

Dad looked up from his notes and said, with undisguised surprise, “Lincoln? 1864? Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Where?”

“Fort Stevens.”

“By who?”

“No idea,” I said, getting a little annoyed at his bizarre line of questioning.

“Really? Hmm.” Dad murmured something I didn’t catch and made a few more notes. Then he snapped the book shut, lifted his fingertips to his temples and rubbed them absently. The world slugged forward, my microwave now reading 11.27 and nine seconds, and he looked around nervously.

“They’re on to me. Thanks for all your help, sweetpea. When you see your mother, tell her that I’m okay and remember to dissuade her from painting the bedroom.”

“Any colour but cherry, right?”

“Right.”

He smiled at me and I felt my eyes moisten; eighteen years without either of my parents often left me with a craving for their company, but Dad’s visits were always too short.

“See you soon.”

And then he was gone. The world rippled as the clock started again, and the normal noise of Boston traffic returned. I sighed.

Maybe I would give Mom a late-night call after all.


	3. The Fall Guy

"Neanderthal, _Homo neanderthalensis_

Successfully re-engineered in 1989 by QuangTech Corporations using DNA taken from an unnamed PDR, the Neanderthals were originally intended to be used as ‘medical test vessels’ – living creatures that were as close to human beings as possible without actually _being_ human beings, or at least as far as the law was concerned. Nobody predicted that the previously extinct species would turn out to be arguably more intelligent than human beings, and even the hardiest of medical technicians baulked at the thought of experimenting on the gentle creatures. They were instead released into the general populace as cheap labour (their lack of aggression making them awful soldiers), granted protected status in 1994 and Union States citizenship in 2005 (Confederate States in 2010). Contrary to popular belief, they are not stupid: their poor reading, writing and numeracy skills are the result of fundamental differences in visual acuity. In humans, this is called dyslexia. Conversely, they have incredibly advanced facial acuity and can have up to thirty different interpretations of what a human would call a ‘blank look’. This highly developed facial grammar means that Neanderthals have little interest in theatre, film or politicians, although they have been found to enjoy opera. They never throw anything away, love collecting power tools, and their reported favourite television show is a twelve-hour Norwegian program dedicated entirely to whether firewood ought to be stored bark-up or bark-down."

Mary Margaret Nolan,  _Encyclopaedia of Formerly Extinct Species (Unpublished)_

 

I ended up returning Mom’s call in the morning while I made myself scrambled eggs and toast and tried to ignore the sound of my neighbour pounding up and down the stairs. Mrs Cuse is unfortunately forgetful and makes about eight trips every morning to collect things that she left at home. It was also raining, so every five minutes I heard her swear about the muddy water left behind on the landing by her boots. Recalling my conversation with Dad, I tried to subtly suggest that painting the bedroom cherry red was a bad idea – only for Mom to completely misunderstand, thank me for the _fantastic_ idea and hang up before I could argue. Then I thought about calling my brother, but a number flashed on the screen that I was obligated to answer.

“Hey, Winston. What’s up?”

Winston was Jack’s secretary, and a Neanderthal. His assignment to the NCD was part of the ‘equal opportunities’ program initiated when _Homo neanderthalensis_ was granted sapient status in 2005; no-one else wanted to work with him, so he eventually trickled down the departments until arriving at the NCD. Jack, of course, was never going to turn him away. Winston’s inability to read and write was made up for by the fact that he was a walking, talking lie detector that even _I_ had to look up to – and I fancy myself quite a good lie detector. And he’d proved to be a remarkably good secretary once he’d implemented a colour-coded dialling system on the office’s old phone.

“Hiya. Are you coming in today?”

I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t much past eight-thirty.

“’Course. What’s the problem?”

“Wall-fall in Kenmore. It looks like another one of ours. Briggs wants everybody over there ASAP.”

“Right,” I said, scribbling down the address he then gave me. “I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

After shoving scrambled eggs into a Tupperware container, I headed downstairs to the garage to collect my old Volkswagen Beetle. I’d taken out my keys to unlock it when I heard a voice shout: “Nice car, miss!”

It belonged to a grubby child of maybe eleven sitting on the wall and trying to bounce a football with a puncture in it. His friend, whose mother had cruelly forgotten to smear with grime that morning, grinned excitedly.

“Sweet!” he exclaimed, showing gappy front teeth. “1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle, Crayola, sixteen hundred cc engine and four-spoke energy-absorbing steering wheel! Don’t see too many of those around anymore.” In a less geeky tone, he added, “Not surprising, though. They’re total shit.”

“Listen,” said the first kid in a business-like tone. “Give us a fifty and we’ll torch it so you can cop the insurance.”

“Better make it ten,” said the second kid. “Fifty is all she’d get.”

“Police,” I snapped. “Now shove off.”

The boys were unrepentant.

“Cops pay double. You want us to torch your wheels, you’ll have to pay us twenty.”

Then they ran off, probably to break something.

My car was one of the few mementos I’d kept of my former life living on the wrong side of the law. I’d ‘found’ the car in an alleyway after I finally got out of the foster system at the age of seventeen. It was over forty years old, had travelled over 650,000 miles (I’d be able to tell you the exact number if the odometer wasn’t broken) and worn out two engines and four clutches just in the time that I’d owned it. The kid was probably right in that I really should’ve got a new car, but for my own reasons I was rather attached to the old bug. Reasons that mostly had to do with the scruffy lunatic I’d found in the back seat the day I’d stolen it.

But I really didn’t want to think about Neal right now.

The rain had eased up but traffic still gave me a problem as I made my way out to the West Fens. I eventually got there, forty-five minutes later, and had two missed calls from Briggs when I finally pulled the bug up to a typical Victorian brownstone house that had been built in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the bay was reclaimed. The smell of the Charles River mixed in with the rain – not altogether unpleasant – and a couple of posh-looking teenagers in expensive outfits pretended that they weren’t spying on all the police activity outside the house. They were shooed away (with sniggers hidden behind their hands) by a young trooper who had maybe a year or two on them at most.

“Morning, Tibbit,” I greeted the trooper.

“Morning, Emma,” he replied, his uniform tunic pressed into a fine crease – probably by his mother – and silver Massachusetts police badge gleaming with a polished sheen in the post-rain sunshine. Tibbit had made full trooper and was sent to the NCD for three months to ease him into policing. But the upper echelon had mislaid the paperwork and he was still there six months later, which suited him just fine.

“What’s the story, kid?”

Tibbit gestured for me to follow him through the house, which was about as well-kept and polished as I would have expected of a West Fens resident. Then we stepped through the pristine kitchen door and into the backyard, where large pieces of eggshell told the story of a recent and violent death. I sighed. Unfortunately, this was not a shock to me. Rather, it was something I’d been expecting for years. See, when you work in Nursery Crime, you start to expect that certain things will just play out the way they will, with no real explanation. Cock Robin takes an arrow through the chest. Hansel and Gretel almost get eaten by a witch with an odd fondness for gingerbread houses. Cinderella loses a shoe at midnight. And, on this particular occasion, Humpty Dumpty had taken a nose-dive.

Mrs Singh, the pathologist, knelt next to the remains dictating notes into a tape recorder and indicated particular areas of interest to the photographer. She waved a greeting to Tibbit and I but didn’t stop what she was doing. On the other side of the yard next to a healthy growth of vine, Briggs and Jack were arguing about something, as they often did. I steered clear and went to talk to Mrs Singh.

“Looks like he died from injuries sustained falling from a wall,” said the fifty-five-year-old pathologist without looking up from her work. “Possibly an accident, possibly suicide. He was found at oh-seven-twenty-two this morning.”

I looked up at the brick wall that surrounded the back yard. There was a ladder leaning next to an obvious indent at the top, shaped suspiciously like the bottom end of an egg.

“Our ladder?”

“His,” said Tibbit.

I knelt down to get a better look at Humpty’s remains. His ovoid body had broken into five distinct pieces with smaller shell fragments littered around the garden. The morning’s heavy rain seemed to have washed away almost all of his liquid centre but had left just enough to make me wrinkle my nose at the distinctive eggy smell. There was one thin, hairless leg – with shoe and water-logged sock – attached to a small area of eggshell. The largest piece contained most of his facial features and was wedged between two trash cans; coloured pale white except for the nose, which was blotchy with unsightly red gin-blossoms, and the one remaining eye was cracked open, revealing a milky-white unseeing eye. He had been wearing a tuxedo with either a cravat or a cummerbund – it was impossible to tell with him.

“Any reason he’s all dressed up?” I asked the general audience.

“He was at the QuangTech Charity Benefit last night. Invite was in his pocket,” said Tibbit. “This isn’t his house. The owner is a friend of his who drove him home and offered to let him sleep off the drink. Apparently he was well sloshed.”

“Hmm,” I mused, the photographer’s flash going off and looking inordinately bright in the dull closeness of the yard. “We’d better call his doctor and see if there was anything off about his health. Depression, phobias, illness, dizzy spells, vertigo, et cetera.”

“You knew him, didn’t you?” said Mrs Singh.

“Briefly, when he was still lecturing on children’s literature and business studies at Boston University,” I replied, though the pale old lush lying in pieces around me was hardly the jolly old man I’d known back then. “Good company and funny as heck, but he was a crook. Jack and I questioned him in 2009 about a racket in which he had eight container-loads of Bonchester cheese imported from Scotland the week before the government ban. The compensation deal netted him almost half a million, but technically he’d done nothing illegal. He was like that, though. Always up to something, ducking and diving and exploiting the loopholes.”

It was a pity Rumple never got to meet him; they would’ve been great pals. I shook my head to clear the invading thought.

“They fired him from the college about six months later because they suspected him of having his hands in the till.”

“Surely they couldn’t fire him on pure suspicion, though?” asked Tibbit.

“No, but he did make the mistake of having an affair with the dean’s wife and it got pretty messy. The last I’d heard of him, he was into commodity speculation.”

At that, Jack walked over, blue in the face and looking ragged. I grinned sheepishly.

“Briggs wants this cleaned up and report on his desk by Wednesday morning?” I asked before Jack said anything.

“Tuesday, actually,” Jack answered with a scowl and shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets. “He’s still upset about the failed conviction of the three little pigs.”

I let out an audible groan, then quickly checked to make sure that Briggs wasn’t listening. He was talking to the homeowner. I swear that all he ever thought about was his precious budget. When I first joined the NCD, I’d made the mistake of claiming overtime pay for a stakeout at Bluebeard’s house and ended up with a half-hour lecture on economics and finances and a whole load of other stuff I barely understood for my trouble. Since then, I’d been careful – although to be fair to Briggs, he did make up for it with decent vacation time at the end of the year, which (with my family in a different state) I desperately needed.

“Listen, Tibbit and I can take care of things here,” Jack continued. “I need you to go back to the office and see if you can track down his wife. See what sort of state she’s in.”

“He’s married?” I asked, sounding a little more surprised than was really professional.

“They separated about eighteen months ago. Her name was Laura Garibaldi.”

“As in the cookie manufacturer?”

“Biscuits, Swan.”

I rolled my eyes. Jack could be undeniably English at times.

“Right.”

“Then see if you can scrounge up any background info on Humpty. It might be worth finding out what he’s been up to lately.”

 

The NCD headquarters are, in a word, cramped. We’re severely underfunded and so get crammed into a tiny room in the basement of the Massachusetts State Police headquarters. A couple of dividers make some private office space for Winston and me away from Jack’s desk. Charlie and Gretel have a chair each, and Tibbit owns one square metre between the filing cabinet and the wall. There was no window and the whole place still smelt faintly of cabbage from when it was used as a cold room by the cafeteria staff. After saying hi to Winston, I slipped into my desk chair and dumped the pile of accumulated telephone messages into my top drawer for later. A faded, dog-eared photograph blew out of the drawer and onto the floor. My throat clenched as I picked it up, as it was a photo I hadn’t looked at in quite some time.

The picture was of five youngsters in Union Army uniform sitting around a Jeep. It had been taken somewhere in Kentucky – I could no longer remember exactly where. I was off to the side, almost twelve years younger and known only as Corporal E.R. Swan, RA139580, Driver, 42nd Light Armoured Brigade. Back then I hadn’t been the unfortunate victim of a military disaster or a war hero with the medal to prove it, just a lost kid who’d wanted to make something of herself. After I was discharged, they’d wanted me to give talks about recruitment and valour and all that bullshit. I’d only been too happy to disappoint them. In ten years, I’d attended a grand total of one regimental reunion and had left that one early when I kept looking for the faces that I knew weren’t there.

Of the five people in that picture, I was the only one to come out of the war (mostly) intact. Alexandra Herman had lost three fingers and sight in one eye to a grenade. Jason Cole was in a wheelchair, a well-placed sniper’s shot having severed his spinal cord. I had my arm around Neal, who’d had an argument with a landmine and come out of it without his left leg. And Leo, the other brother I now rarely talked about, on my other side looking ridiculously like Dad, was still out there somewhere.

“Who’s that?” asked Gretel, who had just appeared over my shoulder.

“Whoa! Hey! You scared the crap outta me!”

“Sorry. I did knock. Kentucky Campaign?”

 I nodded and handed her the photograph. “Yeah.”

“I take it that’s your brother?” said Gretel, to which I nodded. “I figured. You two have the same chin.”

“Yeah, we used to share it on a rotation basis. I had it on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays –”

“Is the other one Neal?”

I frowned and swivelled my chair to face her. To the best of my knowledge, I had _never_ mentioned Neal to anyone in the office. It was personal, and I felt sick thinking that she might have been poking into my past behind my back.

“How do you know about him?”

She must have sensed the anger in my voice, because she smiled sweetly and raised an eyebrow. “ _You_ told me about him.”

“I did?”

“Well, the speech was pretty slurred and for the most part complete garbage, but it certainly sounded like he was on your mind.”

I winced. “Last year’s Christmas party?”

“Or the year before. You weren’t the only one talking garbage.”

“We were engaged,” I said suddenly.

Gretel grimaced and bit her lip. Unfortunately, Civil War fiancés could be _seriously_ bad conversation topics. “Did he – hem – come back?”

“Most of him. He left a leg behind. We don’t speak too much anymore.”

“What’s his last name?” Gretel asked, clearly excited by the opportunity to dig a bit of my history out of me.

“Cassidy,” I told her. It was the first time I’d said his name out loud in – wow, I don’t even know how long. “Neal Cassidy.”

“Neal Cassidy the comic author?”

“Yep.”

“Good-looking bloke.”

“Thanks,” I said uncertainly, though I had no idea what I was thanking her for. I took the photograph back and Gretel clicked her fingers.

“Briggs wants to see you,” she announced, having just remembered what she’d come in to tell me.

 

 Briggs wasn’t alone. A man in his forties was standing by the desk and looked up when I entered. He didn’t blink much and had a long, ragged scar marring one side of his face. Briggs fidgeted in his chair and motioned for me to sit down.

“Police?” I asked, taking the empty chair. “Did a relative die or something?”

“Not the time for sarcasm, Swan,” said Briggs. “This is Operative Tamworth.”

“How do you do?” said Tamworth, extending a hand.

“SO-1?” I asked, expecting a reprimand – if not from him, then definitely from Briggs.

But Tamworth just looked surprised. “Me? No.” Then he turned to look at Briggs, who hummed and hawed for a moment before muttering something about checking on Jack.

Once Briggs was gone, Tamworth dropped a buff file with my name on the cover onto the desk. I was honesty surprised by how fat it was.

“Is that all about me?”

He ignored the rib, and crossed his arms in front of him. “How do you rate the Dumpty case?”

“Beg pardon?” I asked, having missed the question because I was staring at his scar, and not subtly. It was hard not to – it stretched from his forehead to his chin and had all the size and delicacy of a shipbuilder’s weld. He shivered and instinctively covered it with his hand, then pretending to scratch his head at the last second.

“Cavalry sabre at Louisville,” he murmured as if to make light of it.

“Kentucky vet?”

Tamworth smiled. “Seems we have something in common.” He paused for a moment and then drew a shiny badge out of his pocket. “I’m SO-5.”

“SO-5?” I gasped, failing to hide my surprise. “What do you lot do?”

“That’s restricted, I’m afraid. I showed you the badge so you could talk to me without worrying about security clearances. So, what do you think about the Dumpty case?”

“Do you want my opinion or the official version?”

“Your opinion. Official versions I can get from Briggs.”

“Too early to tell,” I told him frankly. “We don’t even know if there’s foul play involved. He could’ve just had too much to drink and taken a dive from the top of the wall. For all we know, it was a complete accident.”

Tamworth grinned again. “But you don’t really believe that, do you?”

I frowned, and he chuckled.

“Sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff – it comes with the territory. I know who you really are, Emma. The daughter of Snow White – also known as Mary Margaret Nolan, president of the Maine Animal Rights and Conservation Society – and presumably Prince Charming. Much as I’m sure he’s never told you, Geoffrey thinks very highly of you and considers you an asset to the NCD. Of course, that’s because you’re a PDR yourself – and PDRs are self-proclaimed experts on weird stuff.”

I nodded along. The most surprising thing about all of that was hearing what I presumed to be Brigg’s first name.

“I guess so. So how come you’re talking to me? I’m SO-26, as the upper echelon loves to remind me.”

Tamworth patted the file. “Yeah, I know. Special Operations Recruitment doesn’t really have a good word for ‘no’, so they just fob. It’s what they do best. But, I had a word with Briggs, and he believes he can let you go for a while if you want to lend a hand over at SO-5.”

“If you’re SO-5, he doesn’t really have a choice, does he?”

“True,” Tamworth agreed, “but _you_ do. I’d never recruit anyone who didn’t want to join up.”

I frowned, thinking about Humpty. Jack was short-handed as it was and if – as Tamworth had so gently hinted –`it _did_ turn out to be foul play, then he definitely couldn’t spare me.

“What about Humpty, sir?” I asked cautiously. Tamworth might have told me that it was my choice, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t run some serious risks by turning down a job offer from SpecOps higher up the ladder. “Much as I appreciate the offer, I do actually like my job – as you said, I’m especially suited for it – and I’m not so sure that I want a transfer.”

“It’s only temporary,” Tamworth replied. “And as for Humpty – let’s just say that there’s a good chance that you might find a few answers by lending us a hand.”

“Really? Like what?” I asked with mock fascination. He chuckled again, pulled a form out of his briefcase and slid it across the table. It was a standard security clearance which, once signed, gave SpecOps the right to pretty much everything I owned and a lot more besides if I so much as breathed a word to someone with a lesser clearance. I eyed him suspiciously before carefully signing my name and passing it back. In exchange, Tamworth handed me a brand-new SO-5 badge with my name already engraved on the front.

“I’m the head of SO-5 field operations, which is basically a Search-and-Containment facility. Well, I say ‘head’ but that doesn’t mean much. At the moment it’s just me and two other guys.”

“Three people in a SpecOps division?” I asked curiously. “Even by NCD standards, that’s a bit ridiculous.”

“Well, I lost a few last week.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No, not like that. We made a bit of headway and that’s not always a good thing. Some people research well at SO-5 but don’t like the fieldwork. They’ve got kids, or families. I don’t, but I get it.”

I nodded. I get it, too.

“We get posted with a man to track until found and contained, and then get another one,” Tamworth continued. “SO-4 is pretty much the same; they’re just after a different mark. Well, usually. You know what the upper echelon is like with paperwork. Anyway, one of my boys was up at Kenmore this morning and found this.”

Out of his pocket, he retrieved a plastic resealable bag with a shiny spent slug inside of it.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to turn it over to Jack once we’re done here,” he said before I could say anything about withholding evidence. “And photographs detailing where it was found.”

“Great. But how does that help us find Humpty’s killer?”

“Easy. I already know who did it.”

I stared at him. “Who?”

“Here,” he said, holding up a piece of paper.

“Peter P-”

“No!” Tamworth suddenly barked, so that I almost fell out of my chair. “Don’t say his name.”

“Why not?”

“Because he can hear someone utter it – even whispered – over a thousand-yard radius, probably even more. I lost six men before we figured that out. I call it Rule Number One. The important thing is: you know who he is. More importantly, you’ve met him.”

“I have?”

“He also goes by –” Tamworth held up another card, this one with ‘Malcolm Gold’ printed on it.

I nodded. Now _that_ name I was familiar with. And not at all surprised that he’d turned to a life of crime.

“Yeah. I know him. He’s related to an ex.”

Malcolm Gold was Neal’s distant cousin, or something like that. I’d met him once, all too briefly – and in my opinion, not briefly enough – a little over fourteen years ago in New York. It had been the first time I’d met Neal’s dad and stepmother as well, and frankly the four of us had been lucky to survive the encounter. That was fairy-tale families for you.

“Mr Cassidy, yes,” Tamworth murmured. “Sorry to drag you back into an old relationship, but I need your help.”

“Why me? Why not go to Neal, or his dad –?”

“Because they’re not police,” said Tamworth. “And emotionally involved, even if Mr Gold swears he has no connection to this man.”

“Right.” I nodded again, understanding his point. “So why do you think he killed Humpty Dumpty?”

He reached into his case again and pulled out a file marked ‘Most Secret – Special Operations 5 clearance only’. The slot in the front where the mugshot was supposed to go was empty.

“We don’t have a picture of him,” said Tamworth as I had a look through the file. “The bastard is too damn sneaky. For some reason, we’ve never been able to catch him on film or photograph him, and he’s never been in police custody for long enough to be sketched. Now, my weapons expert tells me that slug was fired from the top of the house next door. The one directly across the street is outfitted with enough security cameras and motion sensors to rival Fort Knox, and they didn’t pick up a single thing until _after_ the shot was fired. Do you see what I mean?”

I nodded and flicked through the pages of Pan’s file.

“I’ve been after him for six years, Emma. He’s got twenty-nine outstanding warrants for murder – eleven in England, five in Canada and thirteen in America. Extortion, theft, child kidnapping. He’s cold, calculating and ruthless. Of his forty-two known victims, thirty-four of them were police, ambulance or SpecOps. And the other eight were children.”

“Hartlepool in 2008?”

“Yep,” said Tamworth. “You obviously heard about it.”

Most people had. Pan had been cornered in the basement of a multi-storey parking lot after a botched robbery. One of his associates was dead in a bank nearby; apparently Pan had killed the wounded man himself to keep him from talking. In the basement, he’d talked an unfortunate English officer into giving him his gun and then killed six others while he waltzed out. The only officer who survived was the owner of the gun. That was Pan’s idea of a joke. The officer in question never gave a satisfactory answer as to _why_ he had given up his weapon. He’d taken early retirement and gassed himself in his car four years later after a battle with alcoholism and severe depression. He came to be known as the seventh victim.

I shivered just thinking about that case. It was still unbelievable that Neal was actually related to that sociopath.

“I interviewed the Hartlepool survivor before he killed himself,” Tamworth went on. “After that, I was instructed to find … _him_ at any cost. That’s when I formulated Rule Number Two: if you ever have the misfortune to face him in person, _believe nothing that he says or does._ He can lie in thought, deed, action and appearance and has incredible power of persuasion over those of weak mind. This is probably the point at which I should mention that we’ve been authorised to use maximum force.”

“I’ve met him, remember?”

“Of course. We have a shoot-to-kill policy concerning our friend –’

“Whoa, wait a second. You guys have the power to eliminate _without_ a trial?”

“Welcome to SO-5, Emma. What did you think _containment_ meant?” He let out a laugh that was more than a little disturbing.

“Is it legal?”

“Not usually, no. It’s Blind Eye Grand Central below SO-8. Ever hear the saying: _Below the eight, above the law_?”

“No.”

“You hear it a lot around SO-5. That’s our Rule Number Three: Apprehension is of minimal important. What gun do you carry?”

I told him and he scribbled a note.

“I’ll get Skinner to find some fluted expansion slugs for you.”

“There’ll be hell to pay if we get caught with those.”

“Self-defence only,” said Tamworth quickly. “Don’t worry – _you_ won’t be dealing with him. All I want from you is a positive ID if he shows up. But, and this is important: if the shit hits the fan I’m not leaving any of my people with bows and arrows against the lightning. And anything less than an expanding slug is about as useful as wet cardboard against him. Even his own family knows virtually nothing about him. He just appeared on the scene in ’95 as a petty criminal who’s since worked his way up to number three on the International Most Wanted list.”

“Who’re number one and two?”

“I don't know, and I have been reliably informed that it’s far better not to know.”

“Great. So where do we go from here?”

“I’ll call you when we’ve got something. In the meantime, consider yourself on leave from the NCD. Stay alert and keep your pager on you at all times. I’ll see you later.”

He was gone in an instant, leaving me with the SO-5 badge, the slug, a manila folder with Humpty’s name on it, and a thumping heart. Briggs returned soon after he’d left, followed by a curious Gretel. I showed them both the badge.

“Congratulations!” said Gretel, giving me a hug that was made very awkward by the fact that she stood over a foot taller than me. Briggs seemed much less impressed.

“They can play rough at SO-5, Swan,” said Briggs in what was probably supposed to be a fatherly tone. “You’re sure about this?”

I pointed to the slug and the Humpty file, and his face fell.

“Jack’s in deep shit, isn’t he?”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, sir, I don’t think it’s an NCD case anymore.”

He didn’t look consoled, instead stroking his chin in a thoughtful way. “Alright. But I still want you to go back to your desk and have a long, long think about this. Have a cup of coffee and a cookie. No, make that _two_ cookies. Don’t make any rash decisions, and run through all the possible pros and cons of this assignment. When you’ve done that, I’m more than happy to adjudicate. Do you understand?”

I understood. In my hurry to leave the office, I almost forgot the photo of Neal.


	4. Peter Pan

‘… The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts – and let’s face it, I am rather an expert in this field – is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good – and we all know how rare _that_ is …’

Malcolm ‘Peter Pan’ Gold, _Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit_

 

Tamworth didn’t call that week, nor the week after. I tried to call him at the beginning of the third week but was put through to a trained denialist who flatly refused to acknowledge that Tamworth or SO-5 even existed. I used the time to get up to date with some reading, filing, replaced my broken toaster, rearranged the furniture in my apartment five different ways and fixed the rear wheel torque bearings on Jack’s Allegro when I went to his place for lunch. He seemed upset about losing the Humpty case, but when SO-5 gets involved, you don’t ask a lot of questions. Besides, it meant that he got to go to his son’s hockey finals and take his wife out to a nice dinner on her birthday, so he couldn’t be _too_ upset.

Two days after catching up with the Spratts, I ran out of ways to rearrange my furniture and had taken to haunting the café down the street just to get out of my apartment. That wasn’t so bad, except that they had the news running 24/7 and almost all of it was about the blockade at Fort Donelson.

“It’s all bullshit, Swan,” said Nick Chopper, the café owner, when he noticed me hiding away from the television. Like me, he was a Civil War vet but from an earlier campaign. Unlike me, he had lost a lot more than his innocence and some good friends; he hobbled around on two tin legs and still had enough shrapnel in his body to make a dozen cans of peaches. “Dunno why those stupid UN folks think the Civil War’s got anything to do with them.”

Chopper was one of the few people that I ever talked to about the war, despite our opposing views. Nobody else really wanted to. The soldiers involved in the ongoing dispute with the Soviet Union had more kudos; Civil War personnel on leave usually left their uniforms in the closet.

“I guess not,” I muttered non-committedly, thumbing my pager.

“Makes all the lives lost seem wasted if we capitulate now,” Chopper said gruffly. “The UN already forced the Confederacy to outlaw slavery – proof that we were right all along. You might as well suggest that we give Alaska back to the Canadians!”

“We did give Alaska back to Canada,” I replied patiently. Chopper’s grasp of current affairs was generally confined to the World Cup and the love life of once-famous British actresses.

“Oh, right. We did do that, didn’t we? Well, we shouldn’t have. And who do the UN think they are, anyway?”

“I dunno, Chop, but if they can stop the killing, they’ve got my vote.”

“Those effin’ hillbillies could stop it right now by surrendering!” Chopper grunted belligerently.

It wasn’t an argument and we both knew it. The Kentucky-Tennessee border was a churned mess of foxholes, trenches and unexploded artillery shells, and the Maryland-Virginia border wasn’t much better. The bits that weren’t completely impassable were blocked off by barbed wire fences and armed border guards. The Confederates weren’t about to return to the Union, and the Union wasn’t about to recognise the Confederate secession; that was all there was to it.

Luckily my pager beeped and provided a much-needed reality check before unwelcome memories of the Kentucky campaign could invade my mind.

 

I was in South Boston in less than forty minutes. The area was one that had yet to benefit from the Old Colony Redevelopment Project, with streets full of run-down public houses that had been built before the Second World War. I doused the lights of my car, hid anything of value and got out. The bug was battered and grotty enough that it shouldn’t arouse too much suspicion in the grimy surroundings. I glanced around at the address that Tamworth had given me. It was a shabby converted warehouse, with crumbling brickwork and smears of green algae where the down pipes used to be. The windows were cracked and dirty, and the ground level was stained alternatively with graffiti and the sooty blackness of a recent fire. A rickety old fire escape was broken halfway up, with the lower half lying in a heap on the sidewalk and the upper half casting a staccato shadow on the grimy road. I made my way to a side door according to Tamworth’s instructions. Inside, large cracks had opened up in the walls and someone had drawn a four-leaf clover with the slogan “England Get out of Ireland” scrawled underneath. I climbed the stairs to the seventh floor, compared a number with Tamworth’s address and knocked on a door covered with peeling peach-covered paint. It was opened by a man who was all shoulders and no neck. He shaded his eyes with a calloused hand, and I showed him my badge.

“Oh, hi. You must be Swan,” he said conversationally, waving me inside. Tamworth was peering through a pair of binoculars at a room in the building opposite and waved a greeting without looking up. I turned back to his associate.

“Call me Emma.”

He seemed gratified and shook my hand. “Name’s Buckett. I’m temporary until Tamworth can get a replacement. You’re NCD?” he asked, walking into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

“Yup.”

“I wanted to be a LiteraTech,” he told me, scooping a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug. “But they said you had to read a book or two.”

“That usually helps.”

“Milk and sugar?”

“Black with two, thanks.”

He nodded and dwindled into silence as he focused on the coffee. I didn’t mind, and it gave me a chance to have a look around. A trestle table against one damp wall was stacked with surveillance equipment. A Revox spool-to-spool tape recorder slowly revolved next to a mixing box that placed all seven bugs in the room opposite and the phone line onto eight different tracks of the tape. Set back from the windows were two binoculars, a camera with a powerful telephoto lens and next to that, a video camera recording at slow speed on a ten-hour tape.

Tamworth looked up from the binoculars for the first time and grinned happily.

“Good to see you, Emma. Come and have a look!”

I did. In the apartment opposite, I could see a well-dressed sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties talking on the phone.

“That’s not him.”

“I know,” said Tamworth. “That’s an associate of his. Greg Mendel. We found out about him this morning. SO-14 were going to pick him up but _our_ man is a bigger fish; so I called SO-1 and got them to intervene on our behalf. Mendel is our responsibility at the moment. Have a listen.”

He handed me a pair of earphones and I looked through the binoculars again. Mendel was sitting at a large walnut desk and flicking through a copy of the _Boston and District Car Trader._ As I watched, he stopped, picked up the phone and dialled a number.

“Hello?” said Mendel into the phone, which I could hear over the tapped lines.

“Hello?” replied the female recipient of the call.

“Do you have a 2000 Chevrolet for sale?”

“He’s buying a car?” I asked Tamworth. He shook his head.

“Keep listening. Same time every week, apparently.”

“It’s only got eighty-two thousand miles on the clock,” continued the woman, “and runs really well. The registration’s paid until next April as well.”

“Sounds _perfect,_ ” said Mendel. “I’m willing to pay cash. Would you hold it for me? I’ll be about an hour. You’re in Dorchester, yes?”

The woman agreed and read over an address that Mendel didn’t bother to write down. He reaffirmed his interest and then hung up, only to call a different number about another car in Mission Hill. I took off the earphones and pulled out the headset jack so we could hear Mendel’s nasally rasp over the loudspeakers.

“How long does he do this for?”

“According to SO-14, until he gets bored. Six hours, sometimes eight. He’s not the only one. Anyone who has ever sold a car gets someone like Mendel on the phone at least once. Here, these are for you.”

He handed me a box of ammunition with expanding slugs developed for maximum internal damage.

“What are we hunting? Bison?”

Tamworth didn’t look amused.

“We’re up against something _quite_ different here, Emma. Pray to the GSD that you never have to use them, but if you do, don’t hesitate. Our man doesn’t give second chances.”

I nodded, took the clip out of my automatic and reloaded it, along with the spare I carried with me, leaving a standard slug on top in the event of an SO-1 spot check. Over in the other apartment, Mendel had dialled yet another number, this time in Roxbury.

“Hello?” answered the unfortunate car owner on the other end of the line.

“Hi. I saw your advert for a Ford Focus in today’s _Trader,_ ” said Mendel. “Is it still for sale?”

He got the address of the car owner, promised to be around in twenty minutes, put the phone down and then rubbed his hands with glee, laughing childishly. He put a line through the advertisement and went onto the next one.

“He doesn’t even have a license,” said Tamworth from the other side of the room. “He spends the rest of his time stealing Biros, shoplifting _Star Wars_ collectables from toy shops and causing kitchen appliances to fail after the guarantee has expired.”

“That’s a little childish.”

“I’d say,” agreed Tamworth. “He possesses a certain amount of vindictiveness, but nothing like his boss.”

Buckett came in, handed me a cup of coffee, stuck the headphone jack back in and sat down slightly shakily at the binoculars. Tamworth picked up his keys.

“I have to meet up with my opposite number at SO-4. I’ll be about an hour. If anything happens, call me – my number is on Redial One. Have a read of this if you get bored.”

He handed me a small book bound in thick red leather.

“ _Snow White_?” I asked sharply, wondering if he was playing a joke. Tamworth shrugged on his overcoat.

“You can tell me which parts the brothers got right,” he said with a strangely boyish grin, and then left after a quick goodbye. I put the book in my pocket and sipped my coffee.

“Do you like it at the NCD?” Buckett asked conversationally with his eyes still trained on the building opposite. I nodded.

“It’s weird and it’s wacky and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I’m usually SO-9. But Tamworth has a lot of trouble with recruitment. That scar on his face – I don’t know if he told you, but he got it when he took a cavalry sabre for me at Louisville. I owe him.”

I looked at him. “You’re a Kentucky vet too?”

He shrugged. “I don’t like to talk about it much.”

I nodded in understanding. I didn’t either. He then took out his wallet and showed me a picture of a little boy, maybe two years old.

“I’m married now, so Tamworth knows I can’t stay. One’s needs change, you know.”

“Good-looking kid,” I said, even though he looked exactly like any other dribbling toddler I’d ever seen.

“Thanks. So, you know what our guy looks like, right?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“He’s related to an ex.”

“Thin build?”

“When I last saw him.”

“Average height?”

“Five-eight or so.”

“Messy hair, sort of a sandy colour, curls around the ears and the back?”

I looked at him. “Yeah –?”

“I think he’s over there.”

I jerked the headphone jack out again and looked through the binoculars.

“Peter!” came Mendel’s voice over the loudspeaker. “What a pleasant surprise!”

I shifted the binoculars to look slightly to the left, where I could see Pan near the doorway of the apartment. He was dressed in a designer jacket with a striped red and black scarf and looked _exactly_ the same as he had fourteen years ago. Same sticky-out ears, same devilish eyes, and not a day older than nineteen. I shivered involuntarily – no way could that be natural.

“Crap,” I muttered. Buckett had already dialled the number to alert Tamworth.

“Mosquitoes have stung the blue goat,” he whispered into the phone. “Thanks. Can you repeat that back and send it twice?”

My heart beat faster. There was no way to know how long Pan would stick around and he’d already killed one person in my jurisdiction – no way was I going to let it happen again.

“I’m going over there.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You heard. Stay here and call SO-14 for armed back-up, silent approach. Tell them that we’ve gone in and to surround the building. Suspect is most likely armed and highly dangerous. Got it?”

Buckett had gone pale. I thought of the picture of his kid.

“I’m not asking you to come with me,” I told him. He nodded and took out his gun before following me down the stairs and into the lobby. I was about to step onto the street when I heard him call my name.

“I’m sorry, I – I can’t do this,” he said very quickly, loosening his tie and rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve – I’ve got my kid and my wife and –”

“It’s alright,” I said, more to stop him rambling than anything. “Go on. Get out of here – the shit’s about to hit the fan.”

He bit his lip, white as a sheet. “You’re not gonna wait for SO-14 no matter what I say, are you?”

“He could be long gone by the time they get here. We’ve just got to keep him occupied.”

Buckett nodded again, and then shook my hand. “Good luck, Emma.” And he left without another word.

I pulled out my automatic, pushed open the door to the street and walked slowly across the road to the building open, trying to keep to the shadows. As I did so, Tamworth pulled up in his car. He did not look happy.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Pursuing the suspect.”

“Like hell. Where’s Buckett?”

“On his way home.”

“I don’t blame him. SO-14 on their way?”

I nodded. He paused, looked up at the darkened building and swore.

“Shit. Alright, you stay behind me and stay sharp. Shoot first, questions later. Remember, below the eight –”

“– above the law. I remember.”

“Good.”

Tamworth pulled out his gun and we stepped cautiously into the lobby of the opposite building. Mendel’s apartment was on the seventh floor. Hopefully, surprise would be on our side.


	5. Search for the Guilty, Punish the Innocent

‘… Perhaps it was just as well that she had been unconscious for three weeks. She had missed the aftermath, the SO-1 reports, the recriminations, Tamworth’s funeral. She missed everything except for the blame. That was waiting for her when she woke up …”

Sidney Glass, _Emma Swan – A Biography_

 

I tried to focus on the lights above me. I knew that _something_ must have happened the night that Tamworth and I tackled Pan, but for the moment at least, that particular event had been wiped from my mind. I watched the lights flicker and fractured images paraded across my mind. I remembered shooting a little old lady three times before running down a fire escape. I had a dim recollection of blasting away at Tamworth’s car and being shot in the arm. I looked at my arm and sure enough, it was bound with a white bandage. Then I remembered being shot again – in the chest. After a brief experiment with my breathing, I was relieved to hear that no crackly rasp reached my ears. Then a nurse said a few words that I couldn’t decipher and smiled at me. I thought it was odd, and fell back to sleep.

I dreamt about Kentucky. For a while, I was back on the ridge. Mortars exploded above my head, bullets whistled past my ears. I ran through the trenches. Tamworth appeared, blood soaking the front of his uniform. I kept running. A voice called my name. It was Neal. Then he was Leo. Then Pan.

The next time I woke up, the clock told me that it was morning and the room somehow seemed colder. I had only been asleep for a few hours. I realised I was alone in a hospital ward with five empty beds. Buckett was unconscious four beds down, a ventilator covering his face. Just outside the door was an armed police officer standing guard, while a vast quantity of flowers and cards vied for space in the rest of the room. As I lay in bed the memories began to bubble to the surface, tumbling out of my subconscious. I resisted them as long as I could but it was like holding back the ocean. Everything that had happened came back in an instant, and I cried.

Five days later I was strong enough to get out of bed. Gretel and Jack came by, the latter with his wife and youngest son, and even my mom had made the trip down from Storybrooke to see me. She told me that she had painted the bedroom red, much to Dad’s disappointment. I was glad for any sympathy, of course, but like a broken needle, the unwelcome reality kept coming back to me: there had been a monumental fiasco and someone was going to be held responsible. And, since Buckett was still unconscious, his back slowly repairing itself, I knew that someone was going to be me.

An empty laboratory was cleaned out and converted into a temporary office; into it came Tamworth’s old divisional commander, a man I’d never met named Flanker, who was completely devoid of humour. He brought with him a twin-cassette desk tape, a heavy leather briefcase, a grey-haired IA investigator called Spencer and four SO-1 senior operatives who didn’t introduce themselves – and I thought it better not to ask.

“I’ve read Tamworth’s file on Mr Malcolm Gold. I think I’ve read novels that were less fantastical, Miss Swan,” said Flanker while I stared at the table. “Tamworth was a loose cannon. SO-5 was his and his alone; quite frankly, this ‘Peter Pan’ was more of an obsession than a job. From our initial enquiries it seems that he had been flaunting basic SpecOps guidelines. Contrary to what he told you, we _are_ accountable to Congress, albeit on a very discreet basis.”

I grunted non-committedly in response. He took no notice, consulted his notes and switched on the tape recorder. He stated the date, time, his name and mine but referred to the other operatives by numbers only, and then took the seat across from me.

“So what happened?”

I paused to think and then began, giving the story of the stakeout right up until Buckett’s hasty departure while Spencer took notes.

“Tamworth and I entered the lobby of Mr Greg Mendel’s property,” I told them. “We took the stairs. On the sixth floor we heard a shot. Tamworth thought we had been rumbled.”

“Evidently, you had,” Spencer grumbled. Flanker looked at him, and then back to me.

“Who was in front?”

“Tamworth. We got to the seventh-floor landing and looked around before advancing. It was empty apart from a little old lady who was trying to open the lift doors. Tamworth and I approached Mendel’s apartment and found that it was empty.

“We saw you on the surveillance video, Swan,” said one of the nameless operatives. “You conducted your search well for an SO-26.”

“Did you see Pan on the video?” I asked, ignoring the jab.

The same man coughed. Clearly, they’d had trouble coming to terms with Tamworth’s reports, but the video was unequivocal. Pan’s likeness had not shown up at all – only a disembodied voice.

“No,” the man admitted. “No, we did not.”

“Tamworth cursed and walked back to the door,” I continued. “That’s when I heard the second shot.”

I stopped again, trying to remember the event as clearly as I could although I could not fully understand what I had seen or felt. I remembered my heart rate dropped, how everything had suddenly become crystal clear as though I had just stepped out of the shower. I had felt no panic, just an overwhelming desire to see the job completed. I had watched Tamworth die but felt no emotion. That was to hit me later.

“Miss Swan?” said Flanker, interrupting my daydreams.

“What? Oh, sorry. Uh, Tamworth was hit. One glance told me that the wound was incompatible with life. I heard boots hit the fire escape, so I went to the window and saw Mendel racing down the stairs. Pan wasn’t with him. Mendel started shooting too, but I let him go. I assumed Pan was on the landing because of the angle of the shot that hit Tamworth, so I went to the door and looked out.”

“What did you see?”

“The old lady. She was still standing by the lift. I think it was broken. I couldn’t hear anybody downstairs, and thought Pan must’ve gone to the roof. Then the old lady gave up waiting and walked past me on her way to the stairs. I didn’t know why at the time, but she gave me a bad feeling. She walked through a puddle of water, grumbling something about the infrequency of buses, and I saw her footprints. Despite her small feet, the footprints looked like they had been made by a man’s-sized shoe. Then I remembered Tamworth’s Rule Number Two: Pan could hide in lie, deed, action and appearance. I – I fired my gun.”

There was silence, so I kept talking.

“Three shots hit her in the back. The old lady – or the image of her, I should say – tumbled out of sight and I walked to the stairwell. Her belongings were strewn all the way down the stairs and there was a shopping trolley on the landing below. Her groceries had spilt out and cans of dog food were rolling down the steps.”

“So you hit her?”

“Definitely.”

Flanker made a face and held out a hand to one of the SO-1 operatives, who procured a small evidence bag from his pocket and dumped it on the table. When no-one else touched it, I opened it. Inside were three of my slugs, flattened as though they had been fired into the side of a tank.

Then Flanker spoke again, his voice edged with disbelief.

“You say that Mr Gold actually disguised himself as an old lady?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did he do that?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

“How could a man standing at five-foot-eight by your own admission, pass himself off as an old woman that you would describe as ‘little’?”

“I don’t think he did it physically, sir. I think he just projected what he _wanted_ me to see.”

“That’s insane,” said Spencer.

“There’s a lot that we don’t know about Pan,” I objected.

“ _That_ I can agree with,” said Flanker. “The old woman’s name was Mrs Hubbard; we found her wedged in the chimney in Mendel’s apartment. It took four men to pull her out.”

“Can you explain why you, Agent Buckett and Agent Tamworth were armed with expanding ammunition?” asked one of the other officers, whose eyes were so dark they might have been black. “Fluted hollow points and high-power loads. Did you think you would be shooting bison?”

I took a deep breath. “Pan was shot nine times without any ill effects in 2008, sir. Tamworth gave us expanding slugs to use against him. He told me that he had SO-1 approval.”

“Well, he didn’t,” said Flanker. “Shit, Swan, if the papers get hold of this, there’ll be hell to pay. SpecOps is already on shaky ground with the press. _The Mole_ keeps demanding access for one of its journalists. In this climate of accountability the politicians are leaning on us more than ever. I mean, expanding ammunition – shit, the Special Cavalry doesn’t even use that on the Confederates.”

“That’s what I said, but from the state of these,” I countered, shaking the bag of flattened slugs, “I would say that Tamworth was holding back. We should’ve been carrying armour-piercing.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said another operative, shaking her head.

We had a break then. Flanker and the others vanished into another room to argue while a nurse brought me a sandwich and changed the dressing on my arm. I had been lucky; there was no infection. I started thinking about Buckett while waiting for the others to come back. The poor guy had been shot in the back. The doctors said he would live, but the chances of him ever walking again were essentially non-existent.

Then the interview resumed.

“I descended the stairwell and found a nine-mil Beretta on the steps next to a can of sardines. I couldn’t see Pan or the old lady anywhere. Three floors down I found a door that had been shoved open. The hinges had been sheared and the bolt broken. I questioned the occupants but they were both too busy laughing; apparently Pan had told them a joke about three anteaters in a bar, so I got nothing out of either of them.”

The operative shook her head again.

“ _What is it now?”_ I demanded.

“Neither of the people you described remembers you or Mr Gold entering the apartment. All they recall is the door bursting open for no apparent reason. How do you account for this?”

“Obviously, I can’t,” I snapped. Flanker made a face. I took a breath and reined in my temper before going on. “Tamworth suggested that Pan has the power to influence weak-minded people.”

“Hmm,” muttered a different operative. “The couple _did_ try to tell us the joke about the anteaters. I was wondering about that.”

“It wasn’t really that funny, was it?”

“Not at all. But they seemed to think that it was.”

“Can we please get on with this?!” Spencer interrupted. I decided not to be an ass and did as he asked.

“I searched the apartment and found that their bedroom window had been smashed. It led out onto the fire escape, and I saw Pan jump to the ground from the bottom ladder. I knew I couldn’t catch him. That’s when I saw Buckett had come back. He snaked around a parked car, using the shadows to hide himself, and aimed his gun at Pan as he landed on the pavement.”

An operative huffed. “Idiot should’ve run when he had the chance.”

“Yes, he should have,” I agreed.

“Did you hear anything they said?” asked Flanker.

“Not at first. I was halfway down the fire escape when I saw Buckett stand up and tell Pan to get on the ground. But Mendel appeared around the corner and shot him. I saw him fall. I thought he was dead too.”

I sniffled and wiped my nose. Nobody offered me a tissue.

“I fired again from where I was. I don’t know if I hit Pan, but I think he did stumble a bit. Then he ran for the nearest car. That was Tamworth’s.”

“Then what happened?”

“I jumped the rest of the way down. Landed in the dumpster and twisted my ankle. I saw Pan smash the window of Tamworth’s car and open the door. It took him a couple of seconds to get the engine started with a screwdriver. The street was a dead end, so if he wanted to get out, it had to be through me. I hobbled out to the middle of the road and fired. I know all of my shots hit the mark. Two in the windscreen and one in the radiator grill. He accelerated, I kept firing. A wing mirror and the other headlamp. He kept coming. I used my last shot to hit the offside tyre and Pan finally lost control. The car hit a parked Volvo and turned over, bouncing on the road until it skidded to a stop right in front of me.”

I took another sip of water and avoided looking at the assembly. They were following my every word, but the hardest part was yet to come.

“I reloaded and then ran to check the car. I expected to find Pan when I opened the door. But the car was empty.”

“Did you see him escape?”

“No. I did a sweep of the street and found nothing. There was a bar or something one block down. A guy stopped me outside and asked what the hell was going on. I didn’t stop to answer his questions, but I thought there was something off. I told him to get out of there as quickly as possible. He said something – I’d rather not repeat it on record – and made to leave, but he sort of shimmered slightly, like a candle flicker. So I shot him –”

“ _Excuse me?!”_ Spencer exclaimed, now clearly outraged. “You shot an unarmed civilian _in the back?!”_

“It was Pan. He dropped the guise and rubbed his back where I had shot him.”

“You seem to shoot an awful lot of people in the back,” Spencer observed. “You’re telling me that you shot him with fluted slugs at point-blank range and he _survived?!_ ”

“Yup.”

“She’s lying –” he exclaimed indignantly. “I have had just about enough of this –!”

Flanker waved a hand to quieten him. “Carry on, Miss Swan.”

“We – we talked for a while. I knew Pan from years ago. That’s why Tamworth wanted me on the job, because I knew what he looked like.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He tried to talk me into giving him my gun. I didn’t. I’m not sure why I was able to resist him, but I was. Then I asked him why he had killed Humpty Dumpty. He said he had his reasons, that he was sorry about my friends, and then he attacked me. Next thing I knew, he had my gun and he shot me in the arm. He goaded me a bit more, but we both heard the sirens coming. He shot me again in the chest and ran for it.”

As I came to the conclusion, the SO-1 officials shuffled uncomfortably and exchanged looks that told me that they didn’t believe a word I’d said. I didn’t care. I would have died if not for the copy of _Snow White_ that Tamworth gave me – I’d put it in my jacket pocket before the fight. The bullet had penetrated to the back cover but hadn’t gone through. Sure, I’d spent three weeks recovering from broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a bruise that would’ve made a pro boxer jealous, but I was alive. Luck, or fate, or whatever the hell you wanted to make of it.

“That’s it?” asked Flanker.

I nodded. “That’s it.”

“Well, in that case, I would say that’s about everything we need to know, Miss Swan. You can return to the NCD as soon as you are fit to do so. I’ll take the opportunity to remind you that you are bound by the confidentiality clause that you signed. A misplaced word could have serious consequences. Is there anything you would like to add for the official record?”

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I know this all sounds far-fetched but it’s the truth. Whoever goes after Pan next needs to know what he will do to survive.”

Flanker leant back in his chair, looking thoughtful. “Academic, Miss Swan.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pan is dead. Despite a certain trigger-happiness, SO-14 are not total losers. They pursued him along Route 93 until he crashed his car near Exit twelve. It rolled down an embankment and burst into flames. We didn’t want to tell you until we’d heard your evidence.”

The news hit me, squarely and hard, in my already bruised chest. Thoughts of revenge were one of the few things that had got me through the past three weeks. And worse, without Pan, my testimony would go unproven. Not that I’d really expected anyone to believe it, but I’d thought at least I could look forward to the validation that came when others crossed him.

“He’s not dead,” I said suddenly. Flanker gave me exactly the same look my mother did when she thought I was being stupid.

“I realise that it might be difficult to come to terms with, but he is. The body was burned beyond recognition. He was identified through dental records. He still had your gun on him.”

I looked at the floor. The whole operation had been a fiasco.

“Miss Swan,” said Flanker, leaning forwards again, “none of this will be published above SO-8. You can return to the NCD without a blemish on your record. Yes, there were errors in judgement made that night, but none of us have any idea how things might have turned out given a different set of circumstances. As for you, I promise that you won’t hear from us again about this matter.”

He then shut off the tape recorder, wished me a swift recovery and walked out of the room. Spencer made a face before joining him, along with three of the operatives. The fourth waited until her colleagues were out of the room and then whispered to me:

“I think your testimony is bullshit, Miss Swan. The service can ill afford to lose the likes of Philip Tamworth.”

“Thank you,” I said without looking up.

“What for?”

“For telling me his first name.”

The woman moved to say something, thought better of it, and left with her colleagues.

 

A nurse arrived to wheel me back to the ward. We had to pass Buckett’s bed. A doctor was taking observations from his monitor as we went by, and I realised that he was conscious. The nurse grumbled as I got up with the wheelchair still in motion and went to see him.

“Hey.”

“Uh, Miss Swan –” the doctor started, but Buckett laid a hand on his arm to quieten him.

“It’s alright, Doc. I need – I need to talk to her.”

The doctor looked at me, then back to Buckett and to me again. He twitched his nose, perhaps in annoyance, and then slung his purple stethoscope around his neck before leaving with the nurse. Ignoring the two of them talking about stubborn patients, I took the seat next to Buckett’s bed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Upstairs, like I’ve been run over by a tank. Downstairs, nothing at all.” He sounded both nasally and raspy, and I could hear the faint drone of oxygen coming out of the nasal cannula. He groaned and shut his eyes. “Emma, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I said his name. I – I didn’t mean to, it just slipped out while I was talking on the radio. That’s why I came back.” He turned his head. It was obvious the effort was more than he could take. “The doctor told me that Tamworth didn’t make it.”

“No.”

“Shit.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. Buckett didn’t seem to agree.

“He died because of me.”

“No. He died because Pan shot him,” I insisted. And I meant it. “You didn’t see what he could do, Buckett. I don’t think it would’ve made a damn bit of difference whether he knew we were there or not.”

“Charlie,” he said suddenly.

“Sorry?”

“Charlie. It’s – it’s my name,” he explained. “Thought you should know.”

“Uh –” I never knew what to say in these sorts of situations. “Am I allowed to know that?”

“Well, in light of recent events, I am no longer SO-9,” he said. “I’ve been discharged with a full pension.”

“Ah.” I fiddled with my hands for a bit, unsure of what to do with this new information. Then I asked: “How’s your wife doing?”

“Okay. Grateful that I’m alive. Mostly, she’s just been trying to cope and take care of the kid. But they’re okay. Actually, she’s coming round this afternoon.”

“That’s good.”

I didn’t tell him how Pan had used his death – when I’d still believed it – to grind me down. That was how he had got in the first shot.

_“Shame about Agent Buckett,” said Pan, grinning evilly. “He has a son, doesn’t he? Poor kid. Just imagine what it will be like for him, to grow up never knowing his daddy – oh, wait. You don’t have to imagine, do you?”_

For the first time in my life, I had fired a shot in anger, and then Pan was able to wrestle the weapon off me.

“And your son?”

“He’s okay, too. I can’t wait to see him.”

“I bet he can’t wait to see you either.”

Buckett chuckled weakly. I saw that the conversation was taking a greater toll than he let on, so I stood up and squeezed his hand. “I’ll let you rest.”

“Yeah.” He squeezed my hand in return. “Thanks, Emma.”

“No problem, Charlie.”

I pulled the curtain across to let him have some privacy and then hobbled back to my bed. I sat on the covers, feeling utterly dejected. Tears come to me easily when no-one else is around. I let myself cry for a good five minutes and felt a great deal better afterwards, blew my nose noisily and then lay down. The television was on, right across from me, replaying the morning’s news. It was about Fort Donelson, of course.

“Still on the subject of Tennessee State,” read the captions about three seconds behind the speaker, “QuangTech’s Special Weapons Division has unveiled the latest weapon in the struggle against the Confederate aggressors. It is hoped that the new Ballistic Plasma Energy Rifle – codenamed ‘Pobble’ – will be the decisive weapon to change the tide of the war. Our defence correspondent, Mr Attery Squash, will now take us through it.”

The scene switched to a close-up of an exotic-looking weapon handled by a soldier in Union Army fatigues.

“This is the new Pobble plasma rifle, unveiled today by QuangTech Special Weapons Division,” announced Mr Squash, standing next to the soldier on what was obviously a firing range. “We can’t tell you very much about it for obvious reasons, but we can show you its effectiveness and report that it uses a bolt of pure, concentrated energy to destroy artillery and personnel from up to a mile away.”

I felt my jaw drop as the soldier went through with the demonstration. The target tank crumpled like tinfoil under the power of thousands of invisible lightning bolts. I thought for sure that there was no way the Union Army would authorise the use of such things – then I remembered who I was thinking of. The barrage ended, and Mr Squash asked a colonel a couple of obviously posed questions while more soldiers paraded with their new weaponry in the background.

“When do you suppose the front-line troops will be issues with Pobbles?”

“The first shipment is on its way now. The rest will be delivered just as soon as we can set up the necessary factories.”

“And what do you believe will be its effect on the war?”

“I predict Pobble will have the Senator Moseley hand-delivering the Confederates' surrender within a month.”

“Oh, _bullshit,_ ” I spat. I’d heard that before. Every other week during my stint in the military, in fact. It had supplanted the good old ‘over by Christmas’ for sheer fatuousness and, like its predecessors, had always, without exception, been followed by appalling loss of life.

I kept watching in spite of myself. Even before the first deployment of the new weaponry, its mere existence was upsetting the balance of power on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. No longer keen on withdrawal, the Union was trying to negotiate a total surrender of Confederate troops. The Confederate, of course, was having none of it. The UN was demanding that both sides return to the talks in Honolulu, but that had stalled. The Confederate Army had dug in to face the expected onslaught, and a QuangTech Special Weapons spokesperson had been instructed to appear before Congress to explain the delay of the new weapons, now a month behind schedule.

 

Sometime later, as I was trying to doze off, a screech of tyres roused me from my thoughts. I sat up. My car was sitting in the middle of the hospital ward. I blinked twice but it didn’t vanish. Weird. My mother had told me she’d taken custody of the car and it was now sitting in Jack’s mother’s garage, waiting until I could pick it up. There was no reason for it to be in the room, or any evidence as to how it got there. The ward had double doors, but they weren’t big enough to fit a _car_ through.

“Emma!” shouted the driver with a sense of urgency in her voice. She was maybe thirty, and looked sort of familiar. The person in the passenger seat was staring at me, and waved cheerily. “He didn’t die! The car crash was a blind! Men like Pan don’t die that easily! Take the posting in Storybrooke!”

“Storybrooke?” I echoed. Damn it. I thought I had escaped that town – far too many painful memories.

I opened my mouth to ask her more but there was another screech of rubber and the car vanished, folding like a Monopoly board until there was nothing left but the echo of the tyres and the faint smell of exhaust. That was gone before long, too. I hopped out of bed and plodded down to Buckett’s ward, but he was asleep and had obviously seen nothing. That was when I caught sight of my reflection in the monitor, and jumped in shock.

The driver of the car had been me.

 _Time is out of joint,_ my father’s voice echoed inside my mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, just a teensy bit of self-indulgence here: 'The Grimm Affair' won't qualify, but if any of you are on Tumblr and ... maybe want to think about nominating 'There But for the Grace of God' or 'Intervention' for the 2017 TEAs, I would absolutely love you forever, even more so than just for taking the time to read my stuff! Just a thought, no obligations :)


	6. QuangTech Corporations

‘… No one would argue that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Great Quangle-Wangle and QuangTech Corporations. They helped us to rebuild after the Second World War and it should not be forgotten. Of late, however, it seems as though QuangTech is falling far short of its promises of fairness and altruism. We are finding ourselves now in an unfortunate position of continuing to pay back a debt that has long since been paid – with interest …’

Speech to Congress by Quanglesceptic Steven Lowell

 

My arm was almost fully healed by the time the internal inquiry finally circulated its finding. I wasn’t allowed to read it. I wouldn’t have cared if I could – if I _had_ read it, I probably would have just ended up more dissatisfied and annoyed than I was already.

A couple of days later, I was discharged from the hospital. Briggs dropped by to tell me that I’d been granted four months’ leave before returning to full-time duty, but it didn’t help. I’d decided that I didn’t want to return to the NCD. At least, not in Boston.

Gretel turned up the day I was discharged to help me pack. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Four months’ leave can be pretty boring. Especially if you’ve got no hobbies, or boyfriend.”

She can be annoyingly direct at times.

“I’ve got loads of hobbies.”

“Really? Name _one._ ”

“Painting landscapes.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Gretel rolled her eyes. “Okay, seriously now. What are you going to do?”

I handed her the monthly SpecOps gazette, open to the page with country-wide postings. One entry I had circled in red ink.

“Storybrooke?”

“Why not? It’s home.”

“Home it might be,” Gretel replied, tapping the job description, “but weird it _definitely_ is. You’re really gonna do this?”

“Sure.”

“It’s an opening for a deputy sheriff! You’ve been acting Inspector for three years.”

“Three and a half. And it doesn’t matter. I’m going.” I sighed. “I’m going home.”

I didn’t want to tell her the real reason. The gazette and the job offer had arrived _after_ I’d seen my own car, driven by myself, arrive in the centre of my hospital room. It _could_ have been a coincidence, but the specifics kept nagging at me – _Take the job in Storybrooke._ If the vision – or whatever it had been – was right about the job, then there was no reason that the news about Pan wasn’t also correct. So I had put in my application.

“We’ll miss you around here, Emma.”

“It’ll pass.”

“ _I’ll_ miss you.”

“Thanks, Gretel. I’ll miss you too.”

We hugged, she told me to keep in touch, and then drove me out to Jack’s place so I could pick up my car. I had one more stop to make before I left Boston.

 

It’s an unfortunate fact that the SpecOps Memorial Cemetery in Kenmore is chock full of headstones. I passed by at least a dozen marked with the insignia of SO-14 or SO-9 and a handful of SO-12s before finding the SO-5 I was looking for.

PHILIP A. TAMWORTH

A FINE OPERATIVE WHO GAVE HIS LIFE

IN THE LINE OF DUTY

SO-5 & 155th Light Cavalry, Kentucky Campaign

1967 – 2016

I hadn’t known Tamworth particularly well, but enough to know that he had been a good man and deserved better. I placed a small stone atop his headstone and bid him adieu.

“You got lucky,” said a voice. I turned to see a short man in an expensive dark suit and bowler hat sitting on the bench on the other side of the gravel path. He lifted his head and I recognised him – Spencer, the lawyer who had been present during my hearing with Flanker.

“I’m sorry?” I asked, not sure whether I should have been more disturbed by the intrusion into my thoughts, or the fact that he was there at all. He grinned and stared at me intently.

“I’d like to talk to you about Pan, Miss Swan.”

“He’s a satyr, Greek god of nature,” I told him non-committedly. “Try Googling ‘Greek Mythology’.”

“I was referring to the person,” Spencer replied blankly, and not at all amused. “Mr Malcolm Gold, also known as Peter Pan?”

I heard gravel crunch, and started. Spencer wasn’t alone. Standing next to the bench was a young man with a pair of sunglasses covering most of the distinguishable features of his face, and a bulge in his jacket where a pistol would be. So wrapped up in my own little world, I hadn’t even heard him approach.

“Pan is dead,” I said simply.

“You don’t seem to think so.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been given four months off duty for work-related stress. The shrink reckons I’m suffering from false memory syndrome and hallucinations. If I was you, I wouldn’t believe anything I say – including what I just told you.”

Spencer smiled again, displaying a large gold tooth.

“I don’t believe you’re really suffering from stress at all, Miss Swan. In fact, I think you’re just as sane as I am.”

“Maybe, but how much is that really saying?”

“If someone who survived the Kentucky Campaign, the police and eight years with the NCD came to me and told me that Peter Pan was still alive, I’d listen to them.”

I frowned, getting suspicious. I like to think of myself as a pretty good lie detector, and from what I could tell, Spencer was telling the truth. Or at least what he thought was the truth.

“Should we really be discussing this out in the open?”

“This doesn’t concern the Special Operations Network, Miss Swan.”

“Aren’t you SO-1?”

He shook his head and handed me a gold-edged card with the dark blue QuangTech Corporations logo and the name _George Albert Spencer_ embossed on it.

“I’m QuangTech’s internal representative at SpecOps – their eyes and ears, as it were. Call me their fairy godmother, if you like.”

I had to stop myself from laughing. Spencer was the last person on earth I would ever describe as a fairy godmother. And as for QuangTech, they were a shadowy organisation that existed far outside the government. By constitutional decree, they were answerable to no-one and hand their hands in practically everything. They had honorary members in Congress and in the Senate, financial advisors in the Treasury, civilian oversight of the military and people on the selection panel for Supreme Court judges. Even all of the major universities were required to have a QuangTech overseer living on campus at all times. No-one ever noticed how much they influenced the running of the Union – which just goes to show how good they are at it. Yet, for all QuangTech’s outward benevolence, there were murmurs of dissent over the Corporation’s continued privilege. Their public servants were unelected by the people or the government and their activities enshrined in statute. It was a brave politician who dared to speak against them, and a brave cop who gave them trouble.

I didn’t feel particularly brave at that moment, so I handed him back the card. “Is that why you were present at my hearing?”

“It is. QuangTech likes to know what’s going on in Special Operations, and Peter Pan is, well, of considerable interest to us.”

“Why?”

Spencer gave a small shrug, and then dismissed his henchman rather than answer the question. I tried again.

“What’s your interest in Pan, Mr Spencer?”

“I want to know whether he’s alive or dead.”

“You read the coroner’s report, didn’t you?”

“It told me that a man of Pan’s height, stature and teeth was incinerated in a car. To my understanding, Pan has gotten out of worse scrapes than that. I read _your_ report – much more interesting. Quite why those SO-1 clowns dismissed it out of hand, I don’t know. But the important thing is, with Tamworth dead, you are the only person alive who knows anything tangible about him. I don’t care about who was at fault that night. What I would like to know is why Peter Pan decided to off Humpty Dumpty.”

“I have no idea.”

Spencer hmmed and pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase. “Did you know that Mr Dumpty has been playing the stock markets for over a year now?”

“No.”

“According to QuangTech’s investigators, Mr Dumpty came into possession of a large quantity of gold approximately eighteen months ago. Over two and a half million dollars’ worth. He couldn’t very well sell it in the States – an amount that large would have alerted the authorities long ago – so he took it overseas. He swapped it for copper ore, scrap metal, nickel, Béarnaise sauce, Bonchester cheese, strawberries, quinoa – anything that would retain its value in the States without drawing attention to himself. Then he used the profits to buy a considerable number of shares in QuangTech and to fund research into inter-realm transportation. He personally donated fifty thousand dollars just to update the facility.”

I nodded. That was one of QuangTech’s biggest projects – finding a way to open a portal back to the Enchanted Forest. It was funded largely by PDR charities and corporations who wanted to go back home. So far, not a lot of progress had been made.

“That’s very interesting, but why should any of this concern me?”

“I would think as a police officer, you might be somewhat curious as to how Mr Dumpty acquired so much gold,” said Spencer. “Two and a half million is a lot of gold, Miss Swan. Makes one wonder where he got it from – or rather, _who_ he got it from.”

I stared at him blankly. “Are you suggesting that Dumpty was in league with Pan?”

“The timing is rather coincidental, don’t you think? Dumpty’s death speaks of a unfortunate and nervous lackey who got in too far over his head and paid the price dearly.”

“Bullshit.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dumpty was a crook – I know that better than most – but he was also a philanthropist. He spent twenty years running PDR relocation programs, helping people find their families and get on their feet in the States. That’s in addition to helping topple dictators in former Soviet nations, funding charities that support Civil War widows and orphans, and publicly speaking out against the war. He wasn’t the type to throw in his lot with someone like Pan.”

“Perhaps he didn’t know who he was working for,” Spencer suggested, grinning knowingly. “According to some of the people at the QuangTech Charity Benefit the night of his death, Dumpty was acting … erratic, nervous. He even offered to sell all of his QuangTech shares to Solomon Grundy for a meagre fifty thousand when his stock was worth over ten million. Sounds to me almost as if he _expected_ it.”

“Exactly what are you suggesting?” I asked, my temper rising.

“Nothing in particular, but it is rather curious, isn’t it? Not just poor Mr Dumpty, but the fact that your testimony and Pan’s corpse don’t really add up, do they? You said you shot him after his associate fired on your colleague.”

“Buckett. His name is Charlie Buckett.”

“Whatever. But the burned corpse had no gunshot wounds at all despite the number of times you report having shot him when he was disguised as the old woman.”

“Her name was Mrs Hubbard.”

Spencer ignored me and continued. “The flattened slugs. You would have got the same effect if you’d fired them into a wall.”

“If you have a point, would you please get to it?”

He unscrewed the cap of a Thermos flask and offered it to me. I refused; he poured himself a drink and carried on. “I believe you know more than you say you do, Miss Swan. We only have your word for what happened that night. So tell me, why do you think Peter Pan would be interested in inter-realm transportation?”

“Again, I have no idea.”

“Then why did you take a deputy sheriff’s position in Storybrooke?”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew about that. “It was all I could get.”

“That’s not true. Your work has been consistently assessed above average – although you can be considered something of a loose cannon at times – and your record states that you haven’t been back to Storybrooke in ten years. A note appended to your file mentions the phrase ‘romantic tensions’ – did we have trouble with an old boyfriend, did we?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I think you’ll find that in my line of work there’s very little that _isn’t_ my business. There are a host of other things that a woman of your calibre could do, but to go back to Storybrooke? Something tells me you have another motive.”

“Does it really say all of that in my file?”

“It does.”

“What colour are my eyes?”

Spencer chuckled and took a sip of coffee. “Hazel. The same as your mother’s, in fact. I know you believe that Peter Pan is alive, Miss Swan. I think you have an idea as to where he’s holed up and I’m willing to bet that he is in Storybrooke and that is why you are going there. Am I correct?”

“No,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I’m just going home to sort myself out.”

George Spencer remained unconvinced. “I don’t believe that there is any such thing as stress, Miss Swan. Just weakness, and strength. Only the strong survive men such as Pan. _You_ are a strong person.” He paused, looking me up and down. “If you change your mind, you can call me. But I will have you know that I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

“Do what you want, Mr Spencer, but first I have a question for you.”

“Yes?”

“What’s _your_ interest in Pan?”

Spencer grinned again. “I’m afraid that’s classified, Miss Swan. I’ll be in touch.”

He tipped his hat, rose and left. A black Ford with smoked-glass windows pulled up outside the cemetery and drove him away.

 

I sat on the bench that Spencer had abandoned and had a long, hard think. I had lied to the police psychiatrist in saying that I was fit for work and lied to George Spencer in saying that I wasn’t. Dumpty buying shares and funding QuangTech researchers explained their interest in him, but it could only be for financial gain. QuangTech was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings. Money came first in their eyes and nobody trusted them further than they could throw them. Yes, they had helped rebuild America – such as it was – after the Depression and the World Wars, re-established the economy and kept the half-nations stable. But sooner or later the renewed nation had to stand on its own and QuangTech was seen now as less of a benevolent uncle than a despotic stepfather.


	7. Back to Storybrooke

OYSTERS ONE STEP CLOSER TO VOTE

‘Animal rights took a giant leap away from the Dark Ages yesterday with the passing of the Animal (Anthropomorphic) Equality Bill. The act will guarantee the rights of animals considered intelligent enough to function within _Homo sapiens_ society. Applicants will be required to take a ‘speech and cognitive ability’ test and, if passed by the board, will be issued an identity card that allows them to live unmolested within the designated safe haven of Storybrooke County, Maine. “It is a major triumph,” said Mr Billy Gruff, one of the main lobbyists. “For too long we have been marginalised by society.” The rights of standard non-anthropomorphised animals are unaffected by the act, and these may still be hunted, killed, farmed and eaten with impunity.' 

\- article in _The Owl,_ 13 January 2011

 

Storybrooke is a rather dull four hours’ drive away from Boston. After leaving the city, there isn’t much besides the Maine mountainscape on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. It was raining, too; an early December storm. I stopped off in Portland for a coffee and to give my car a rest. The old thing wasn’t really up to a four-hour drive and I made a note to drop it off at the mechanic’s in Storybrooke when I got there. I wondered if Mr Tillman still worked there.

Half an hour out of town there was a little diner I often visited when going back and forth from home. They made excellent burger sandwiches and my rumbling stomach told me to pull over for lunch. Mrs MacDonald, whose husband ran a farm outside of Storybrooke, smiled at me as I entered. Jill had been running this place for almost as long as I had been alive, and she had an uncanny knack for faces. Even the ones that only showed up once every ten years.

“Emma!” she greeted me happily, hobbling out from behind the counter to give me a hug. The walking stick wasn’t new – Jill’s back had given her trouble ever since she took a tumble down a hill as a child. “How are you, my dear? Will you have your usual?”

“Please, Jill. And I’m good,” I said as she punched my order in and yelled to the cook. “How are you?”

“Coping. The doctor keeps telling me I need to keep off my feet for the sake of my poor old knees. But who would keep that damn husband of mine going if I stopped to put my feet up for a day? Ha!”

Jill was like that; one of those elderly ladies whose minds kept going when their bodies started to fail them. They just keep peddling until they hit the end of the road. I think that’s how I’d like to be when I got to Jill’s age – and die a happy woman if I looked half as good as she did.

“And where’s your boy?” Jill asked. “Haven’t seen him in a good age, either.”

Oh, crap. She meant Neal. It had been so long. I tried to think of an excuse, but a familiar voice thankfully interrupted.

“Corporal Swan –?” they enquired. I turned to find a middle-aged man sitting on the stool to my right, a bottle of Heineken in his hand and a half-smile on his face. I recognised him instantly, even though we hadn’t met in ten years.

“Major –!” I responded, stiffening slightly in the presence of someone who had once been my commanding officer. His name was Phoebus, and I had been under his command the day the Light Armoured Brigade had advanced into the Confederate guns as they sought to repulse an attack on Perryville, Kentucky. I had been the driver of the armoured personnel carrier under Phoebus; it had not been a good day.

“How have you been, Swan?” he asked, swivelling in his chair to face me properly. Our past associations still dictated the way that we spoke to one another.

“I’ve been well, sir. Yourself?”

“Can’t complain.” He laughed. “Well, I could, but it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. The damn fools made me a lieutenant colonel, dontcha know it.”

“Congratulations,” I said, slightly uneasily.

The waitress arrived with my burger, which I started to demolish. I was hungry, and it also gave me a good reason to be otherwise occupied. Phoebus carried on regardless, this time in a lower voice.

“I’m a bit worried about Fort Donelson.”

“Who isn’t?” I asked, wondering if Phoebus had changed his politics since the last time we spoke.

“I know. It’s these UN idiots sticking their noses in where they don’t belong. If we let the Confederate secession hold, it just makes all those lives seem wasted.”

I sighed. His politics hadn’t changed, and I didn’t want an argument. _I_ had wanted the war to be over almost as soon as I got out there. The thing was, it didn’t fit my idea of what a _just_ war should look like. Pushing the Nazis out of Europe had been _just_. Stopping the spread of communism and corrupt dictatorships in South-East Asia had been _just._ The fight over the Southern States’ independence was nothing but arrogance and misguided patriotism.

So I changed the subject. “How’s the hand?”

Phoebus showed me a remarkably lifelike left hand. He rotated the wrist and wiggled the fingers. I was impressed.

“Incredible, isn’t it? They take the impulses from a sensor thingy strapped to the muscles in the upper arm. Good thing I didn’t lose my elbow too.” He wiggled his fingers again, and went straight back to his first subject. “I’m concerned that public pressure might have the government pulling the plug before the offensive.”

“Offensive, sir?”

“Of course!” Colonel Phoebus smiled. “I have friends higher up who tell me it’s only a matter of days before the first shipment of the new plasma rifles arrive at the front. Do you think the Confederates will able to defend themselves against an army equipped with Pobbles?”

“No. Not unless they’ve got their own version.”

“Not a chance. QuangTech are a Union corporation to the end, and they’re the most advanced weapons company in the world. Believe me, I’m hoping as much as the next man that we’ll never have to use them, but Pobble is the high ground this conflict has been waiting for.”

That’s provided that the next man is Napoleon Bonaparte, I thought, only half-joking.

Phoebus then rummaged in his briefcase and pulled out a leaflet. “I’m touring the north-east giving pro-war talks. I’d like you to come along.”

“I really don’t think –” I protested as he shoved the leaflet into my hand.

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “As a healthy and successful veteran of the Kentucky Campaign, it is your duty to give voice to those who made the ultimate sacrifice. If we let those damn hillbillies have their way, every single one of those lives will have been lost in vain.”

“I think, sir, that those lives have already been lost and no decision we make will ever change that.”

He pretended not to hear me and I took another bite of my sandwich. I knew Colonel Phoebus’ rabid support of the conflict was really just his way of coping with the disaster. The order was given to charge against what we had been told was ‘token resistance’, but turned out to be massed Confederate field artillery. Phoebus had ridden on the outside of the APC until the enemy opened up with everything they’d had; a shell-burst had taken Phoebus’ lower arm off and peppered his back with shrapnel. My crew and I had loaded him up with as many other soldiers as we could and driven back to the Union lines with a carrier full of groaning humanity. Then I had gone back into the carnage against orders, driving in amongst the shattered armour looking for survivors. Of the seventy-six APCs and light tanks that had advanced into the Confederate guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the five hundred and thirty-four soldiers involved, fifty-one made it back, eight of them with only minor injuries. Among the dead had been my brother, Leo Nolan. Frankly, _disaster_ doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I finished off my sandwich and covertly placed a twenty next to the plate. “Would you excuse me for a minute, sir?” I said.

“Of course, Swan.”

I left the table and pretended to head for the bathroom. A couple passed between Phoebus and me; I used the moment to duck out of the diner unseen. Thankfully, my car was parked around the back, so he wouldn’t know I was leaving. I tore his pamphlet into a million pieces and let them fly away with the wind before hurriedly driving on to Storybrooke.

 

I don’t know why, but Storybrooke always seems deserted every time I drive back into town. Possibly it’s because I’ve spent so much time away, living in the city. Storybrooke is the definition of a 1980’s backwater hamlet. _Everything_ seems to be stuck in a time loop – the people, the technology. Gas could still be purchased for eighty cents per gallon and outside the town hall was a billboard poster for a late-night showing of _Empire Strikes Back_ at the high school multipurpose centre. I dropped my car off at the mechanic’s and stepped out onto the street, feeling the cool Atlantic sea breeze blow in from the east. Yep, hadn’t changed a bit.

The street outside the mechanic’s was deserted except for a couple of students, home for the holidays and holding an anti-war banner. I caught Phoebus’ name on the wind and realised that they were there for him, hoping to turn him from his pro-war campaigning. They had two chances: fat and slim.

I turned my back on them and walked to the street corner. If they knew who Phoebus was, then there was a good chance that they would recognise me too. I had spoken on the phone to the head of Storybrooke’s police force – a Sheriff Graham Humbert – and was supposed to be getting picked up, but they obviously hadn’t arrived yet. I checked my watch and then had a look around. There was a Will-Speak machine on the other side of the corner. Officially known as a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton, it was a simple box, with the top half glazed and inside a disturbingly realistic mannequin visible from the waist up in suitable period attire. The machine would dispense a short snippet of Shakespearean prose for a quarter. They hadn’t been manufactured since the fifties and were now something of a rarity; Baconian vandalism and a lack of general maintenance were hastening their demise. Nonetheless, they were surprisingly popular in Storybrooke – although that could probably be put down to the fact that you could go to a showing of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ starring the _real_ Queen Titania and get your pockets picked by the _real_ Robin Goodfellow.

This one was a _Richard III_ version. I dug around in my pockets, found a slightly dusty quarter and inserted it. There was a gentle whirring and clicking from within as the machine wound itself up to speed. If memory served, there had been a _Hamlet_ version on the corner of the street where my mother lived when she still owned that small loft in town. Leo used to drag me out there every day when we first met; the two of us had bonded over the stories and imagining the ‘undiscovered country’. Leo, at eighteen and still somewhat naïve, said that he wanted to visit such a place; and he did, four years later, in a mad dash fifteen hundred miles from home, the only sound the roar of the engines and the _crump-crump-crump_ of the Confederate guns.

 _Was ever woman in this humour wooed?_ asked the mannequin, rolling its eyes crazily as it stuck one finger in the air and lurched from side to side.

_Was ever woman in this humour won?_

It paused for effect.

_I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long …_

“Excuse me –?”

I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.

“You’re Emma Swan, aren’t you? Corporal Swan, Light Armoured Brigade?”

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “I’m not here with the colonel. That’s a complete coincidence.”

“Don’t believe in ‘em.”

“Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

The student looked at me weirdly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was, and her eyes went wide.

“You’re the one who went _back_ ,” she marvelled, as though I were a rare variety of stuffed parrot. “Against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.”

“Well, they didn’t.”

“No, not when the _Washington Post_ got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony. You’re anti-war.” She looked at her boyfriend like they had found a pot of gold; which wasn’t all that bizarre in Storybrooke. “Listen, we need someone to talk at Colonel Phoebus’ rally. Someone from the other side. Someone who was there. Someone with a bit of clout. Would you do that?”

“Nope.”

“No? Why not?”

I looked around to see if, by some miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.

 _… Whom I,_ continued the mannequin, _some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?_

“Look, guys, I’d love to help you but I can’t. I spent ten years trying to forget that place. Speak to some other vet; there are _thousands_ of us.”

“Not one like you, Miss Swan,” said the boy with the big nose. “ _You_ survived the charge. _You_ went back to get your fallen comrades out. It’s your duty to speak on behalf of those who didn’t survive.”

“Bullshit,” I snapped, turning to face them front-on. “My duty is to myself. You don’t know what it’s like. I survived the charge and I have to live with that every damned day. Every night I ask myself: why me? Why did I get to live when others, my own _brother_ even, didn’t? ‘Cause you know what, in ten years I still don’t have an answer to that question and that’s only where the pain _starts._ I cannot help you.”

“You don’t have to speak,” said the girl persistently, “but don’t you think it’s better for one old wound to open than a thousand new ones?”

“Don’t you try to teach me morality, you little shit,” I said, my voice raising.

It had the desired effect. The kids looked at each other, then the girl handed me a leaflet, took her boyfriend by the arm and departed. They looked back, as if expecting me to come charging after them. I shut my eyes. My heart was beating like the Confederate artillery, so hard that I could almost hear the rush of bullets in my ears. And I didn’t hear the squad car pull up beside me.

“Hey, Emma.”

I turned and broke into a grin. “Aunt Ruby!”

Ruby spread her arms and gave me a hug. Technically speaking, she wasn’t really my aunt – she was my mom’s oldest friend in the world, and basically family in every way that counted. She was almost fifty-five but still dressed like she was twenty-five when she wasn’t in uniform. Although, in typical Ruby fashion, she rebelled a bit by dying streaks of bright red in her hair and a collection of wristbands and bangles on her left wrist. Ruby was the type who regarded ‘rules’ as ‘guidelines’, to borrow from _Pirates of the Caribbean._

She eventually let me go and jabbed a thumb at the car. “Trunk’s open, you can stick your things in there. How are you?”

“I’ve been declared clinically insane and suffering from massed delusions. How about you?”

Ruby laughed. “So they finally got wise to you.”

The trunk contained a collection of iron stakes, several mallets, a large crucifix and a pick and shovel. There was also a musty smell of mould, garlic and the long dead – I hurriedly chucked in my bag and slammed the trunk lid shut. Then I walked around to the passenger door and got in.

“ _Shit –_!” I cried, suddenly noticing that in the back, pacing the rear seats behind a strong mesh screen, was a giant Siberian wolf. Ruby laughed loudly.

“Oh, don’t worry about him! Emma Swan, this is Mr Meakle. Mr Meakle, this is Emma Swan. She’s come to join the Storybrooke police.”

 She was talking about the wolf. I stared at the wolf, which stared back at me with an intensity that I found disconcerting. Ruby was still laughing her head off and pulled away with a lurch and a squeal of tyres. I had forgotten how weird Storybrooke could be.

As we drove off, the Will-Speak machine came to an end, reciting the last parts of its soliloquy to itself.

_… Shine out, fair sun, til I have bought a glass, that I might see my shadow, as I pass._

There was a clicking and whirring and then the mannequin stopped abruptly, lifeless again until the next coin.

 

Ruby is SO-17. _Biters & Suckers, _they call themselves, specialising in anything over NPS-3. Vampires, werewolves, gorgons, pixies with a devil complex. In the same way that I was ideally suited for Nursery Crime work, Ruby was ideally suited for SO-17; she was a werewolf herself. A glass wolf hung from her rear-view mirror and jangled as we made our way back into town. As she drove, Ruby leant against the door pillar to get the best out of the breeze – _not quite_ sticking her head out of the window – and tapped a beat out on the steering wheel. I noticed a recent scratch on her neck oozing a small amount of blood.

“You’re bleeding.”

Ruby wiped it off with her hand. “Don’t worry about it. He gave me a bit of a struggle, but nothing I can’t handle. Mr Meakle just won’t take his medication. Will you, Mr Meakle?”

The wolf pricked his ears as the last vestige of the human within him remembered his name, and he whined pathetically. Ruby continued: “His neighbours called. All the cats in the neighbourhood had gone missing. I found him rummaging through the bins behind SmileyBurger. He’ll be in for treatment, morph back and be out on the streets by Sunday night. He has rights, they tell me. I take it you put in for the vacant deputy position?”

“Yeah. Is Robin still there?”

“Retired. He had a bad run-in with some of Foulfellow’s gang last spring and broke his knee. Arthritis set in, and he can’t do the fieldwork. Roland says he still hangs around the station a lot, but technically Graham is now in charge.”

“Nice guy?”

“I’ll put it to you this way; if I were twenty years younger –”

“I thought you were!”

We both laughed. Ruby pulled onto Perrault Road and asked: “Am I taking you to Snow’s?”

“Yes, please. How’s Granny, by the way?”

A shadow crossed Ruby’s face. “She passed away last spring. The old ticker finally caught up to her.”

“Oh,” I murmured, feeling small. I realised then just how long I had been away for. “Sorry. I didn’t even hear.”

“That’s alright. She was a hundred and seven, so I guess it was about time anyway. But the bed and breakfast is still there – technically I own it, but Dorothy does all the work so I can keep rounding up folks like him in back alleys. She’s well, by the way.”

I smiled. “That’s good.”

“Anyway,” continued Ruby, brightening up at the mention of her partner. “Don’t mean to pry, but what are you doing back from Boston?”

“I got into a bit of trouble on a run.”

“Ah.”

“And I’m looking for someone.”

She frowned curiously. “Who?”

“Peter Pan.” If I could trust anybody, it was Ruby.

“Pan? I thought he was toast – crashed and burned at E-12 on the eleventh.”

“That’s what we’ve been led to believe. If you hear anything –?”

“No problemo, Emma.”

“And do you mind if we keep this between us?”

“After staking, secrets are what I do best,” Ruby agreed with a grin.

She pulled into the driveway of a cute little cottage that looked as if it was straight out of a fairytale – which technically it was. I got my bag out of the back and gave Ruby another hug.

“Thanks for the lift. I’ll see you around.”

“Not if I see you first!” she said. “I’ll see what I can dig up about your missing friend.”

“I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”

“See ya.”

“Cheerio,” said a timid-sounding voice from the back. We both looked into the rear of the car. Mr Meakle had changed back. A thin, rather pathetic-looking man was sitting in the back seat, completely naked and very muddy. His cheeks were bright red and his hands were clasped mostly over his genitals.

“Mr Meakle! Welcome back!” Ruby grinned broadly as she added in a scolding tone: “You didn’t take your tablets, did you?”

Mr Meakle shook his head miserably.

I thanked Ruby again. As she drove off I could see Mr Meakle waving to me a bit stupidly through the rear window. Ruby performed an illegal U-turn, causing a passing car to brake hard, and was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU so, so much to everybody who voted for 'There But for the Grace of God' in the Espenson Awards! And Gabrielle from Intervention too! (Have to admit, totally wasn't expecting that!) You guys are awesome!


	8. The Nolan Family

‘… My name was the only way that my mother and I ever found each other. Dad was unfortunately preoccupied dodging SO-12 – and believe me, they had the time and place of _my_ arrival in the Real World locked down so securely that a realm-hopping flea would have been eradicated upon arrival at the scene. So it took eighteen years, fourteen different foster homes and a _lot_ of misunderstandings before I found my family again. Neal was a big part of the reason I ever found her, and I was probably the only reason he tried to find his father.”

Emma Swan, _Fairy Tales in the Modern World: The Ugly Duckling_

 

My mom used to live in a small loft in town, which was where my brothers had grown up and I’d spent the majority of my time getting to know my family. A few years back she had taken over the running of the Maine Animal Rights and Conservation Society and found herself in need of a much larger yard to house all of the great auks she had been left with. The cottage was, as I understood it, a typical Enchanted Forest-style building in a street with ten others just like it; an arched door with a porthole in the centre, wood-panel roofing that had replaced the original thatch, a crumbling dry stone chimney at one end and a chicken coop at the other. The painted window frames had faded and the pebbledash facing seemed to be coming away from the wall in several places. I pushed open the front gate with some difficulty as there was a great deal of resistance behind it, and then closed it again with a similar amount of heaving and sweating. The task was made unnecessarily difficult by the assortment of auks who had gathered around to see who it was and got excited when they realised it was someone vaguely familiar.

“Hi, Aesop,” I said to the oldest, who dipped and bobbed in greeting.

“ _Wotcher, Emma!_ ” Aesop plocked happily. “ _Got any marshmallows?_ ”

“No. Sorry.”

Mom and I can both talk to birds. I never realised it was weird until I was sixteen – I’d never hung around any of my foster homes long enough for anyone to realise that I could, or for me to realise that they couldn’t, so I just assumed that it was perfectly normal.

The rest of the auks all wanted to be made a fuss of after that, and I couldn’t pick out any individual words amongst their chatter, so I hung around and tickled them under the chins while they searched my pockets inquisitively, _just in case_ I had left any marshmallows in there that I wasn’t telling them about. I don’t know why auks find them so irresistible; then again, dodos and Neanderthals are exactly the same, so maybe it has to do with the reverse-extinction processes.

Then my mother opened the door to see what all the noise was about, spotted me and ran up the path excitedly. The auks wisely scattered, as Mom can be pretty dangerous at anything more than a fast walk. She gave me a long hug and I returned it gratefully. I really had been gone too long.

“Emma –!” she said tearfully, squeezing my cheeks as she looked me over. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

“It was a surprise, Mom. I got a posting in town.”

She yelped excitedly at the news. “How’s the arm?”

“It can get a bit stiff at times and if I sleep on it, it goes completely numb. Garden’s looking good. Can I come in? It’s cold.”

She apologised and ushered me through the door, taking my jacket and hanging it up on the rack. She looked awkwardly at the automatic in my shoulder holster so I stuffed it in my bag. The house, I soon noticed, hadn’t changed a lick since the last time I had been there; the same mess, the same furniture, the same smell. I paused to look around, to take it all in and bathe in the security of fond memories. The last time I had been truly happy had been in Storybrooke. Moments like this one made me wonder why I had ever left.

We walked through to the lounge, which was still poorly decorated in browns and greens and looked like a Renaissance revival. Above the mantelpiece was a painting, done by Mom’s friend Bashful (yes, that’s the dwarf) of the castle that my parents had once called home. I had to take my mom’s word on how accurate it was and wondered what it would be like to see it for real. Next to it was a shield, white with a red chevron and seven flowers, one of which I had tattooed on my right wrist. Hung up next to the fire poker were my mom’s bow and quiver, and next to that was a coffee table covered in framed photographs. There was a photo of my passing-out parade at police training college, another one of Leo and I in military fatigues smiling under the harsh Kentucky summer sun. The rest were mostly of my brothers as little kids. My father and I were both obviously missing from those.

I sighed and took in the rest of the house. _Name that Fruit!_ was playing on the television and the _Storybrooke Mirror_ was open to the weather map on the sofa. A white-and-ginger herding dog with feathery ears slept on the sofa cushion and wagged his tail happily upon seeing me; his name was Fitzroy, and he is the most laid-back dog I have ever met shy of his father, Dad’s dog Wilby. I walked over to pat him while my mother fussed about in the kitchen making some sandwiches and home-grown apple juice.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m okay.”

“Sleeping well? Have you lost weight?”

“It’s to be expected after being stuck in a hospital for three weeks.”

“True. Seeing anybody?”

“No,” I replied carefully. She would ask me about Neal next.

“Have you called Neal?”

“No. And please don’t.”

“He’s back in town too, you know,” my mom said, bringing over a plate, two glasses and a chew treat for Fitzroy. _That_ part was news; the last I had heard of Neal, he had been in New York drawing cartoons for the _New Yorker._ “It might be worth –”

“Mom,” I insisted, picking up a sandwich. “We broke up ten years ago. It’s not happening.”

She looked disappointed, but shrugged anyway and took a sandwich for herself. Then she asked: “Are you going to stay for dinner?”

I agreed. She wandered into the kitchen to find a chicken that she could boil all of the taste out of. Fitzroy barked as he finished off his treat, and a moment later there was a knock at the door.

“Emma, can you get that?”

I did. It was Jesse. We stood there for a moment, taking each other in, until Jesse remarked, “Mom. You dyed your hair.”

“Very funny,” I said as he grinned. The few seconds that we’d had the door open, three auks waddled in, plocking and nipping at my legs.

“Hey, hey, shoo!” my mother shouted, running over with a tablecloth. “Not inside! You’ve just been swimming! Hi, son.”

“Hi, Mom.” He gave her a hug, then stepped over the threshold so we could close the door. “Hiya, Doofus.”

I smacked him on the shoulder when Mom wasn’t looking. Jesse and I had never been particularly close. He was a cheek, and only fifteen when I left for Kentucky. He had also called me Doofus practically from the moment we met. I’d had to break his nose to make him stop.

“You staying for long?” he asked, rubbing his arm where I had hit it.

“She’s been posted here,” said Mom.

“Really?” Jesse grinned crookedly. “Finally decided to come join us out in the boonies, have you?”

“What can I say? I got homesick.”

“And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that you got shot by a madman and reprimanded by SO-1?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, and he shut up. I took in his mud-splattered jeans (dried, or Mom would never have let him in the door) and the hi-vis shirt underneath his hoodie.

“The cannery got a bit banged up in the last storm,” he said by way of explanation. “Me and the boys are trying to fix the roof before the fishing season starts up again.”

Jesse was a handyman and civil engineer. He spent most of his time fixing things – roofs, plumbing, squeaky cabinets, potholes – and he wouldn’t dream of doing anything different. Frankly, ‘prince’ describes him just as well as ‘princess’ describes me. Leo was the natural leader in the family.

“Anyways, how are you really?” he asked, going serious. There was always a definite and noticeable shift when my brother did that. “Mom told what happened in Boston. Sorry I didn’t come visit – I couldn’t get any time off work.”

“That’s alright. And I’m okay. The arm gets a bit stiff sometimes and my chest still hurts if I try to take in deep breaths, but I’m otherwise functional. Loony, but functional.”

“Right. So not much has changed, then?”

“Hmm.”

“You hear from Dad?”

“Not since before I got shot.”

“He didn’t like the cherry paint in the bedroom,” Mom added with a faint hiss. “I can’t think why you suggested it.”

Jesse beckoned me closer and whispered unsubtly and loudly into my ear: “You’ll have to forgive Mother. She thinks Dad is fooling around with another woman!”

Mom huffed from inside the kitchen. I frowned.

“That’s impossible!” Well, it wasn’t, but the idea was completely ludicrous. Mom and Dad were _literally_ a fairy tale match, and True Love to boot if the stories were true. It was just ridiculous, but Mom and Jesse didn’t seem convinced. “Well, _who_ then?”

“Someone he met at work – Mary Todd someone-or-other.”

I remembered back to my last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Ohioan quartermasters and Lincoln and Confederate revisionists. “Mary Todd _Lincoln?!_ ”

Mom popped her head around the corner. “You know her?” she asked in an aggrieved tone.

“Not personally. She died in the late nineteenth century.”

She narrowed her eyes and huffed. “That old ruse.”

Jesse merely looked at me and shrugged. Then he walked around to the sofa to pet Fitzroy eagerly.

After that, supper was a reasonably friendly affair. We had a lot of catching up to do, and my mom had plenty to tell me about the Women’s Federation.

“We raised almost seven thousand dollars for the ChronoGuard orphans last year,” she said proudly, refilling my glass and Jesse’s with juice.

“That’s great, Mom,” I replied. “SpecOps is always grateful for the contributions, but to be fair, there are a lot of divisions that are worse off than the ChronoGuard.”

“I know, but it’s all so _secret._ ” Mom groaned, shaking her head. “What do all of them even do?”

“Believe me, I have no more idea than you.”

“The only other one that I know of below SO-20 is SO-6,” added Jesse. “That was National Security. But I only know _that_ because Gabi tells me her dad was always getting into trouble with them back in Scotland.”

Gabrielle Gold was Jesse’s best friend, and Neal’s half-sister. An eccentric girl who was prone to blowing up microwaves, Gabi was best described as a bit odd. She took after Rumplestiltskin too much. All of them did. Sometimes I wondered if Belle had contributed at all, as the only thing any of the kids seemed to have got from her was Nicholas’ eye colour. Gabi and Jesse’s friendship would have once made me concerned about an awkward situation given my previous relationship with Neal, but I knew now I had nothing to worry about. Jesse didn’t lean that way, and Gabi was too busy inventing stuff to be interested in guys.

“Some things have to be kept secret for operational purposes,” I recited in parrot fashion. “Certain operations, secrecy is our biggest weapon and best defence.”

“I read in _The Mole_ that SpecOps is riddled with secret societies,” said Jesse, sniffing a chicken wing experimentally before determining it fit for eating. “The Wombats in particular. That true?”

I shrugged. “No more than in any other high-finance or government institution, I guess. I haven’t noticed it myself, but then as a woman, I wouldn’t get approached by the Wombats anyway.”

“Seems a bit unfair to me,” Mom commented in a tut-tutting voice. “Not that I’m not in support of secret societies – nothing I could do about it anyway – but I do think that they should be open to everyone, men _and_ women.”

“I dunno, Mom. Personally, I reckon men are welcome to it,” I said. “At least that way, half the population won’t have to make complete idiots of themselves.”

“Hey!” Jesse protested, and I grinned. He wasn’t the only member of the family with cheek.

Then the conversation dulled, and I picked at my chicken. “Major Phoebus is in town,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Apparently he’s a colonel now but is still blasting that same old line.”

There was an icy hush. By an unwritten rule, nobody ever mentioned Kentucky or Leo in the house.

“Really?” Mom replied with seemingly no emotion. Jesse frowned, and chewed his cheek.

“You gonna debate with him at the rally?” he asked, slightly more interested.

“No. What would be the point?”

“Dunno. Maybe you’d convince someone of some importance that the whole damn war is a waste of time,” he said with a shrug.

“Yeah, maybe.” I sighed. We could all dream.

“You seeing anybody?” Jesse asked, unsubtly changing the subject.

“Not really, no.”

“You gonna call –?”

“ _No_ ,” I insisted, staring my baby brother square in the face. “For the last time, Neal and I are finished. Besides, I lied. I have been seeing someone.”

That, to my mother, was _extremely_ good news. It had been of considerable anguish to her that I wasn’t spending more time with swollen ankles, haemorrhoids and a bad back, popping out grandchildren and naming them after obscure relatives. Jesse wasn’t the sort of person who had children, which really kind of left it up to me. In all honesty, I wasn’t dead set against kids; it was just that I wasn’t going to have them on my own. And Neal had been the last man to have remotely interested me in that regard.

“Really?” Mom piped up, excited. “What’s his name?”

I said the first name that popped to mind. “Charlie. Charlie Buckett.”

Jesse frowned suspiciously, but kept his suspicions to himself and checked the clock. “You sticking around? They’re doing a rerun of _Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ at seven.”

I rolled my eyes. I don’t know why my brother enjoys slapstick British comedies, but I suppose that’s just Jesse’s type. Besides, I did feel like sticking around so I said yes, after asking if Jesse would drop me off at Granny’s B&B afterwards. Mom offered me her spare room, but I declined. I’d already arranged to meet my new boss at the diner in the morning. And besides, I was thirty-three. We watched the show, caught up some more, and nobody brought up Neal’s or Leo’s names again.


	9. The Gold Family

‘… My dad and I had been close when I was a kid, but that changed when I was fourteen. I left home at fifteen, then spent a couple hundred years living on Neverland with my demonic grandfather. I stole his shadow to escape that place and it dropped me onto a street in San Diego. That may not have been so bad, except my grandpa appeared next to me and he was not happy. So I ran for it. I met Emma in Portland, travelled across the country to find her mom, then to New York to reunite with my dad (who had been in Scotland for nearly twenty years by then). Needless to say, I was pretty nervous. But Pop’s curse was long broken, and he had four more surprises for me in the form of a stepmom, sister and two kid brothers. And now we’re closer than ever.’

Neal ‘Baelfire’ Cassidy, _Fairy Tales in the Modern World: The Spinner’s Son_

Neal Cassidy, formerly known as Baelfire the spinner’s son before a series of unfortunate events landed him smack in the middle of a run-down neighbourhood in California, locked his car before walking up the path to his parents’ house. The yellow dreamcatcher hanging from the rear-view mirror swung slightly. Neal watched until it stopped, then shook himself free of the memories.

“Mom? Pop? I’m home!” he shouted up the driveway to the salmon-coloured Victorian manor house, which had not changed a single bit in ten years. This was the house where he had spent years recuperating from the wounds of the Union Army – an ever-present reality as his left knee twinged uncomfortably from the cold wind. His room had been the second window to the right on the first floor. It had aged, certainly; the paintwork on the front door was peeling, a healthy growth of ivy covered the northern wall and the gutter was dented in several places. Nobody answered, but Neal could hear somebody tinkering in the garage so he let himself in through there. The hinges made a horrible grinding noise.

“Bae!” was the enthusiastic greeting from his twenty-nine-year-old sister. Gabrielle jumped off her stool to give him a big bear hug, which he returned in kind. The girl could not have been any more different from her mother; where Belle carried herself with the elegance of a swan, Gabi was a scruffy mouse. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail using a scrap piece of ribbon, paint and oil stains on too-long jeans and she was almost always barefoot. According to Nicholas, that was because she didn’t understand the proper function of a shoe – besides an object to throw at her brothers, that was. “How was New York?”

“Busy. I’d almost forgotten what angry drivers are actually like. You still haven’t fixed the door.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked, taking off her glasses to wipe them. Somehow, they just came back more smudged. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour.”

“Right. What are you working on?”

Gabrielle was a bit of a nutty inventor, so the garage was chock full of her outlandish contraptions as well as their father’s strange antique collection. Robert Gold – formerly known as Rumplestiltskin but, as Baelfire had discovered, trying to go by a name like that in the Land Without Magic got you some really strange looks – had been a lawyer until a few years ago, when he started business as a pawnbroker. As a result, his house was an untidy mess of antiques that nobody wanted anymore. Gabi had torn through most of those while making even more bizarre things – Neal still remembered, on one of his first visits to Scotland, the scrawny fourteen-year-old who had built a working mechanical dragon in the basement using spare parts from a toaster. Some of her later work had included a method for delivering pizza via fax machine and a remote-control omnidroid that could hot-wire a car. The brightly-coloured metallic film _looked_ harmless, but one could never tell with Gabi.

“It’s translating carbon paper,” his sister declared, grinning from ear to ear. “Here, I’ll show you. You write on the plain piece … Spanish beneath that … _must_ get the pages in the right way up, very important … then Norwegian … German … and French. Go on, write anything.”

“Anything?”

“Yup, anything.”

So he wrote: _My hovercraft is full of eels._

“Now what?”

“Take a look.”

Neal lifted off the top carbon paper to reveal, in his own handwriting, the words: _¿Mi aerodeslizador está lleno de anguilas?_

“Wicked!”

The next one was Norwegian and it read: _Luftputefartøyet mitt er fullt av ål._

“Thank you. I’m working on hieroglyphics and demotic at the moment,” Gabi continued as Neal pulled off the German version to read: _Mein Luftkissenfahrzeug ist voller Aale._ “For some reason the Esperanto version won’t work at all. Can’t think why.”

“Still pretty cool; this’ll have dozens of applications,” Neal told her, peeling off the last sheet to read, slightly disappointingly: _Mon aardvark n’a pas de nez._ “Hang on. _My aardvark has no nose_?”

Gabi looked over his shoulder and shrugged. “You probably weren’t pressing hard enough. Here, give this one a try.”

She pulled from the shelf what looked like a trilby hat, except that it was made of brass and covered in wires. Then she stuck it on Neal’s head and flicked a switch. There was a humming noise.

“Is something supposed to happen?”

“Hang on. Close your eyes and try not to think of anything. Is it working?”

“No. Oh, hang on.” He giggled as a clownfish swam past and gave him a high-five. “I can see a fish. Actually, a lot of them.”

Soon enough he was staring at a whole shoal full of brightly coloured fish, all swimming and smiling at him with their cartoon faces right in front of his eyes. They ran on a five-second loop, and jumped back to their starting positions to repeat over and over.

“Stay relaxed or they’ll disappear,” Gabi said in a soft voice. “Try this one.”

There was a blur of movement and the scene shifted to an inky black starfield; for a second, Neal believed that he was actually moving through space.

“How ‘bout this one?” She again flicked a lever, and the scene became a parade of flying toasters. He laughed before opening his eyes, whereupon the image evaporated and he lifted the hat off his head.

“That’s awesome.”

“I thought so, too. It’ll be very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out of a window – that’s if you’ve even got one – you can just transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. Then, as soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in, you blink and _poof_! Back in the real world again.”

“That’ll sell well at SmileyBurger.” Neal handed the hat back. “When are you putting in the patent application?”

“Ah, see, it’s not quite ready for that yet. There’s still a couple of problems I haven’t quite worked out.”

“Like what?”

“Shut your eyes again.”

He did as she asked and a fish swam by. He blinked again and the fish became a toaster. Clearly, it needed a bit of work.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be gone in a couple of hours,” Gabi assured him.

Neal blinked again, the image now stuck as a dancing unicorn. To distract himself, he pointed to the thing next to Gabi’s translation carbon papers. It looked like a leather-bound book with richly decorated casing and heavy brass securing straps. On the front were several dials and knobs, valves and knife switches. It certainly seemed impressive, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Five years ago, she had invented an extraordinarily beautiful machine that did absolutely nothing except predict with staggering accuracy the number of seeds in an uncut watermelon.

“What’s that?”

“I have no idea. That’s Mum and Dad’s project.”

“Really?” Neal frowned. His father was a fiddler, but he’d never known him to be the inventing type. That was Gabi’s thing, apparently inherited from Belle’s mother. “Any idea what it is?”

“Nope, and I really don’t wanna ask.”

He didn’t get the chance to ask any more questions, as somebody in the house shouted “Supper!” and Gabi jumped down from her stool, asking him to turn off the lights on his way out.

 

The house was the same as ever; Belle’s influence managed to keep Rumplestiltskin’s knickknacks in the garage, but that didn’t stop him from putting a pair of cuckoo clocks on the mantelpiece or a putting a bunch of azaleas in a Victorian vase painted in an early Greek fresco-style. And there were photographs everywhere. One thing that his father had picked up in the modern world was a love of photography, so the manor walls were loaded with pictures. Almost all of them were of the kids – baby photographs, birthdays, first days of school. One of Belle reading a book with Gideon when he was about two or three; another of Gabi and Nicholas, aged seven and three respectively, feeding hay to a goat in a petting zoo. The whole family at Eilean Donan on a surprisingly clear Scottish day. There were so many that Neal sometimes forgot that he hadn’t been there for most of it; part of him wondered if it had been his father’s way of making up for how much of _Neal’s_ childhood had been lost to the ravages of time.

Rumplestiltskin was in the kitchen, taking a pie out of the oven to cool when he spotted his eldest boy come out of the garage. Despite being almost seventy, he was still a sprightly old feller. His ankle gave him trouble on particularly cold nights, something they now had in common, and his hair had gone completely grey – that one he blamed Nicholas for, the boy was a troublemaker if ever there was one – but Rumplestiltskin always had a hug and a smile for his kids. Long gone were the days of the mysterious and deadly Dark One, although he hadn’t completely shaken the imp. It had a habit of emerging whenever Rumplestiltskin was faced with someone he particularly detested – which, really, was about two-thirds of the general population. But he and Neal had long since made amends and, since he lacked the ability to turn anyone into a snail, that didn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. It had taken two hundred years, but Neal finally had his real father back.

“Bae!” he exclaimed happily, throwing off the bright red mitts as Neal gave him a hug. “How’d it all go?”

“Done and dusted. Papers are signed, I handed over the keys, the apartment is officially no longer my problem.”

Rumplestiltskin smiled broadly. Then Belle popped out of the kitchen, a smear of flour on her cheek. “Hey! When did you get in?”

“Just now.” Neal leant down to give his stepmother a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Even at fifty-six, she still retained the look of a fairy-tale princess – though, as she often reminded him, she’d only been a minor noblewoman in the old world. Grey was just starting to overtake her chestnut hair, and her blue eyes were brighter than ever. Whatever she had seen in his father, Neal still didn’t know. But they’d been happily married now for thirty-four years, so they must have done _something_ right.

“Excellent! And just in time for supper!” In the direction of the living room, she shouted, “Nicholas! Gideon! Dinner’s on!”

“Okay! Just a minute!” one of Neal’s little brothers shouted back. The cause of their distraction soon became apparent as the _Mario Kart_ theme played over the television. Belle rolled her eyes and sighed audibly.

“They get this from _you_ ,” she scolded her husband, giving him a look. Rumplestiltskin grinned and gave a little chuckle, but wisely did not retort – in spite of the fact that Belle had been known to stay up until dawn reading one captivating novel or another. Besides, it was mostly true – one of the first things Neal had noticed about his younger siblings was how _similar_ the lot of them all were to him and their father. In fact, they had a running joke that _Nicholas_ was the half-sibling in the family, being the only one to have inherited Belle’s blue eyes, reddish hair, and anything in terms of personality from her at all.

“I’ll go grab ‘em,” Neal offered.

From the look of things, his brothers were halfway through Thwomp Ruins (which explained why they weren’t yet interested in dinner) and immensely focused. Gideon was sprawled across the sofa, his tongue sticking out from between his teeth with the level of concentration. He must have just got off work, as he still had his EMT uniform on. Nicholas, wearing jeans and a _Save the Daleks_ t-shirt, was cross-legged on the floor, the Duchess (an elderly white she-cat whose origins Neal hadn’t been able to ascertain) lounging in his lap looking thoroughly pleased with her pillow. At least until Gideon lobbed a red shell and Nicholas practically leapt up to hit him. Some things never changed.

“Oi, giddoff! Ya scunner!”

“A’ll gar yer claw whaur it’s no leukin!” Gideon returned in his thickest Scots accent. Neal’s brothers and sister only adopted the heavy accent while swearing so that their mother had a harder time figuring out what they said, apparently, though it never worked because Belle had spent enough time in Scotland to have gained a decent ear for the language. Out of deference to American ears - they were both almost six feet tall and capable of being intimidating enough as it was - the boys saved talking like proper Scots for the immediate family.

“Who’s winning?”

“Hey!” Gideon pressed pause just before Nicholas could drop a bomb, annoying the youngest member of their family to no end. “When did you get in?”

“Just now. Come on, dinner’s getting cold,” he said, smacking Gideon over the top of the head. Nicholas threw him a look of approval; being the oldest had its perks, one of which was that he could play favourites at his whim.

Gabi was setting the table when the boys trundled in. In an Edwardian cabinet set across from the kitchen, a black-and-white television straight out of the seventies (aerial and all) was playing a rerun of the Thanksgiving parade.

“You know, we’ve been in the States for almost twelve years now,” said Gabi, half-watching the programme while putting cutlery in the wrong places (unless their father had specifically requested two forks for some reason), “and I still don’t get the point behind Thanksgiving.”

“Really? I thought it was pretty self-explanatory,” Nicholas offered, reaching past his mother to fetch the sugar off a high shelf. “Yankee culture at its finest; celebrate the start of a genocide no-one bothers to remember by trying to eat all of the food in the world whilst fulfilling your once-annual obligation to speak to everyone you’d like to burn off the family tree. Simple, really.”

“That’s rich coming from someone who sets off a bunch of fireworks every year on the anniversary of a failed attempt to blow up the British Parliament,” Neal retorted.

“Aye, but there’s one small difference. We still wanna blow up Parliament.”

“Don’t give your sister any idea. We have enough sociopaths in the family already,” Neal murmured unsubtly as he flashed Gabi a grin. She made a face in return, which got them both a semi-baleful glare from her mother. They were spared a lecture by the ringing of the doorbell; Belle went to answer it.

“Hello!” greeted a cheery man in a lumpy corduroy suit. He politely doffed his hat with one hand while showing Belle a dog-eared ID. “My name is Eddie Capillary! Have you ever stopped to wonder whether it was _really_ William Shakespeare who penned all those wonderful plays?”

Across the table, Rumplestiltskin rolled his eyes. “Bloody Baconians.”

“Steady, Pop,” replied Neal. “It’s not illegal.”

“More’s the pity.”

Neal had to chuckle at his father. The Baconians were verifiably insane, but for the most part entirely harmless. Their sole purpose in life was to prove that Francis Bacon, and not Will Shakespeare, had penned the greatest plays of the English language. Bacon, they believed, had not been given the recognition that he rightfully deserved, and they campaigned tirelessly to redress this supposed injustice. Neal would have slammed the door in Mr Capillary’s face if not for the fact that it was always amusing to watch Belle make mincemeat of the poor fools.

“If you really expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote _A Midsummer Night’s Dream,_ ” Belle told the Baconian slowly, “I must be dafter than I look.”

He was not to be put off. He obviously liked fighting a poor argument; in real life he was probably a personal accident barrister.

“Not as daft as supposing that a Warwickshire schoolboy with virtually no education could write works that were not just for an age, but for all time.”

“There is no evidence that Shakespeare was without formal education,” Belle replied steadily. Her tone was even, but Neal knew that she was just getting started. He exchanged a grin with Nicholas and kept watching.

“Agreed,” continued the Baconian, “but I would argue that the Shakespeare in Stratford was _not_ the same man as the Shakespeare in London.”

Belle raised an eyebrow, and even Neal was suddenly interested. It was certainly a different approach. Eddie Capillary seized the opportunity to pounce, and launched into his well-rehearsed patter:

“The Shakespeare in Stratford was a wealthy grain merchant and buying houses when the Shakespeare in London was being pursued by tax collectors for petty sums. The collectors even traced him to Sussex in 1600; yet why wouldn’t they take action against him in Stratford?”

“Search me.”

“No-one in Stratford is recorded as having any idea of Shakespeare’s theatrical successes,” Capillary went on, now very much on a roll. “He was never known to have bought a book, written a letter or indeed, doing anything apart from being a purveyor of bagged commodities; grain, malt and so forth.”

“Hmm.” Belle leant casually against the doorframe and crossed her arms. “So where does Francis Bacon fit into all of this?”

“Francis Bacon was an Elizabethan writer who had been forced into becoming a lawyer and politician by his family. Since being associated with something like the theatre would have been frowned upon, Bacon had no choice but to enlist the help of a poor actor named Shakespeare to act as his front man. History has mistakenly combined the two Shakespeares to give added validity to a story that otherwise has little substance.”

“And the proof?”

“Hall and Marston – both Elizabethan satirists – were firmly of the belief that Bacon was the true author of _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece._ I have a pamphlet here which goes into the matter further. You can find out more at our monthly meetings; we used to meet at the town hall but the radical wing of the ‘New Marlovians’ fire-bombed us last week, so I don’t know where we’ll meet next. But if I can take your name and number, we will certainly be in touch.”

His face was earnest and smug; he clearly thought he had her. Neal had to hide his face to keep from laughing as Belle played her trump card.

“What about the will?”

“The will?” Capillary echoed, now nervous.

“Yes. If Shakespeare were, in fact, two different people, then why would the Shakespeare in Stratford mention the London Shakespeare’s theatre colleagues Condell, Heming and Burbage in his will?”

The Baconian’s face fell. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask,” he sighed. “I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?”

Belle nodded. “I’m afraid so. Sorry.”

“No matter. Thank you for your time,” he said, extending a hand that Belle shook amicably. “Have a nice evening.”

“You too.”

He trotted off down the drive. Perhaps he would have better luck with the neighbours. Belle shut the door behind him, her face glowing as Rumplestiltskin wrapped an arm around her proudly.

“Job well done, as per usual,” he said, bending down to give her a kiss. One of the boys groaned.

“We’re trying to eat here!” Nicholas protested.

 

The Baconian forgotten, the Golds settled into dinner, which was a mushroom-and-chicken pie Rumplestiltskin had made from scratch.

“I finally sold that ugly old urn,” Rumplestiltskin reported, referring to an article that had been giving him trouble for quite some time – it had been meant for somebody’s ashes before the family decided to toss them in the harbour instead. “Old Friar Tuck took a shining to it. He’s going to use it as a centrepiece in the church garden. Nice place; I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

“I dunno, Pop. Churches make me uneasy. Even GSD ones.”

“GSD?” murmured Nicholas. “What the dickens is that?”

“Global Standard Deity,” answered Neal, who had spent more time in large cities where these things were prevalent. “It’s supposed to be a mixture of all the religions, if that’s even possible. The founders reckon it’ll help stop religious wars.”

Rumplestiltskin huffed. “Religion isn’t the cause of wars, it’s the excuse.”

“I know, but if it helps to reduce the casualty rate at all, it’s got my vote. Pass the fish?”

“There’s no fish,” observed his stepmother. “Gabi, have you been using your brother as a guinea pig again?”

Gabi pretended not to hear her. Neal blinked and the fish vanished; then he noticed that Gideon was throwing him a shifty look. Eventually his brother murmured, to no-one in particular, “Emma’s back in town.”

There was a pause.

“You’re sure?” Neal asked, trying not to sound too curious. It had been ten years, and Emma had made her feelings pretty clear back then.

“Yeah, I saw the car while on shift,” Gideon explained, still looking fixedly at his plate. “Bright yellow Volkswagen bug. It’s a bit hard to forget.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Gabrielle piped up, with the tone of one who was trying to end the conversation quickly. “Snow and Jesse are still in town; she might just be visiting.”

Gideon shrugged. He had another bite of pie, then asked, “You gonna go see her?”

“No,” Neal answered straight away. “No. She – she won’t want to see me.”

“You don’t know that,” said Belle, giving him one of _those_ looks. “It might be worth it to –”

“Mom.” It came out sharper than Neal intended. “Emma doesn’t want to see me. Besides, we ended things ten years ago, and we’ve both moved on. No point in opening up that can of worms if we don’t have to.”

“But –”

“ _No._ ”

Everybody fell silent again until Nicholas took the subject back to Friar Tuck’s GSD parish, but Neal was only half-listening, staring at his plate. He could feel Gideon's fixed gaze like a raging thunderstorm, along with the million-and-one ways that his brother would probably try to manipulate him into looking up his old girlfriend. Neal sighed; Gideon was the only one to make his feelings clear, but he knew that the rest of the family wasn’t happy with the current circumstances either.

And at the end of the day, Gideon didn’t have to do much manipulating at all. It might have been a decade, but Neal still felt like jelly thinking of Emma Swan. Surely just one conversation, just to see how she was, how she had been the past ten years, couldn’t do that much damage. Surely.


	10. Granny's Bed&Breakfast

‘Miltons are, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the New York telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Coleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Dylan Thomas and John Keats, plus a handful each of Edgar, Allen or Edgar Allen Poes. Such mass name-changing caused huge problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and prosecuting lawyer had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law was passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn’t been well received, but then few truly practical law-enforcement measures ever are.'

Sidney Glass, _A Short History of the Special Operations Network_

It was about eight o’clock that Jesse dropped me off at Granny’s Bed&Breakfast. The quaint little diner appeared to be rather busy, and as soon as I walked into the lobby it was obvious as to why. At least a dozen men and women were milling about the lounge dressed in large white baggy shirts and breeches. My heart sank. A prominent notice on the reception desk welcomed all comers to the 32nd Annual John Milton Convention. I took a deep breath and fought my way to the desk. A middle-aged receptionist with oversized earrings gave me her best welcoming smile.

“Good evening, madam, and welcome to Granny’s B&B. How may I help you?”

She was perky as a cat on Prozac and recited her intro like a mantra. I could see her working at SmileyBurger just as easily.

“Hi. The name’s Swan; I have a reservation.”

The receptionist nodded and flicked through the reservation cards; they obviously hadn’t got around to upgrading to computers just yet.

“Let’s see. Milton, Milton, Milton, Milton, Milton, Milton, Swan, Milton, Milton, Milton, Milton, Milton, Salinger, Thackeray. No, sorry, it doesn’t look like we have a booking for you.”

“Could you check again?”

She did, and found it.

“Here it is! Sorry, somebody put it with the Miltons by mistake. I’ll just need an imprint of a major credit card. We take: Babbage, Quangle, Newton, Pascal, Breakfast Club and Jam Roly-Poly.”

“Jam Roly-Poly?”

“Sorry, wrong list,” she said sheepishly. “That’s tonight’s choice of puddings.”

She smiled again as I handed her my Babbage charge-card, and she passed me a key attached to a moulded-iron key-ring that barely fit into my hand.

“You’re in room 8. All our units are fully heated, air-conditioned and equipped with mini-bar and tea-making equipment. Do you require a space to park your car?”

“Yes, please.”

She made a note and then said, “Alrighty. Number 8 in the parking lot just outside. Enjoy your stay. I hope you have an interest in seventeenth-century English poets.”

“Only professionally.”

“LiteraTech?”

“NCD.”

“Ah.” She beckoned me closer and lowered her voice. “To tell you the truth, Miss Swan, I _hate_ Milton. His early stuff is okay, I guess, but he disappeared up his own ass after Charlie got his head lopped off. Just goes to show what too much republicanism does for you.”

“Quite.”

“Oh, I almost forgot! These are for you.” She produced a bunch of flowers – orange lilies mottled with red splotches – from under the desk as if in a conjuring trick. “From a Mr Neal Cassidy–”

Oh, damn. Rumbled.

“–and the sheriff is waiting in the diner for you.”

“Oh, good. Thanks, Miss –?”

“Barrett-Browning. Liz Barrett-Browning.”

“Well, Liz, how about you keep the flowers? Make your boyfriend jealous. Also, if Mr Cassidy calls again, tell him I died of haemorrhagic fever or something.”

 

I pushed my way through the throng of Miltons and into the diner itself, which was much less crowded. The sound of a jazz band reached my ears from the open diner door, and a smile crossed my lips as I heard the unmistakeable piano of Jefferson Hatter. As his name suggests, he was a hatter in the old world but had taken up the piano after crash-landing in New Orleans with his daughter. He could have easily played Broadway but chose to stay in Storybrooke to be close to his grandchildren. I stepped outside, felt the cool air around my neck. The outside dining area was busy but not packed, the clientele mostly Miltons who were sitting around drinking and joking, lamenting the Restoration and referring to each other as John. I spotted two gentlemen sitting by themselves in a corner, and headed for them.

The elder of the two was a grey-haired man in his early sixties. He had a full beard, bright blue eyes and was dressed in a neat tweed suit with a black Windsor tie. His hands were holding a pair of brown gloves on top of his walking stick and would have looked like any old academic if not for the dark green hoodie that he wore under the suit. His face had a ruddy appearance, and as I approached he threw back his head and laughed like a seal at something the younger man had said.

The man opposite him was aged about thirty and similarly unshaven. He sat on the edge of his seat in a slightly nervous manner. A half-drunk gin-and-tonic was in his left hand and he wore a dark leather jacket over a police uniform that had seen better days. I knew I had seen him before but couldn’t think where.

The older man’s laughter slowly subsided until it stopped when he spotted me. “Well, look who it is,” he said in a gravelly voice, his cheeks twitching to give away his smile. “Never thought you’d show your face here again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Robin.”

A grin finally broke through his act, and Robin Locksley stood up to give me a hug. He had aged a lot since I’d seen him last, and I couldn’t hide a grimace at the crack in his knee when he got up.

“Should you be out in this weather?”

He wagged a finger at my concern. “Don’t you start. I’ve already got Roland and Belle jumping down my throat every afternoon, telling me to take it easy. I’m old, not an invalid!”

“Right.”

“It’s good to see you, too. Emma, I don’t believe you’ve met Graham Humbert. Graham, this is Emma Swan. Good egg, but a bit of a nutter on her better days.”

I ignored Robin’s jab and looked to Graham. “Have we met before?” I asked, shaking his outstretched hand.

“No. I’m sure I would have remembered that,” said Graham firmly.

“PDR?”

“My parents were.”

“So,” Robin announced, settling back into his seat with another painful crack of his knees. “We all heard about the incident in Boston. Snow told us you were lucky to make it out alive. I’m not surprised. By all accounts, Pan was a monster. I’m not sorry he died. I hope you’re recovering well?”

“Luckily. There were others who weren’t so fortunate.”

“I know,” Robin agreed forlornly, looking listlessly at his whiskey. He shook himself out of it and then carried on, “Anyway. So there’ve been a couple of changes since you were last here. One shattered patella, fractured tibia and a femoral artery patch means that I’m no longer fit for fieldwork, don’t know if you heard –”

“I did. Ruby told me.”

“Ah. Good on her. So I’m retired–”

“On paper,” interjected Graham cheekily. “I’ve threatened to tie him to the doghouse just to get him to leave the station.”

“–and Graham here’s taken over things, so you’ll be reporting to him,” Robin continued as if Graham hadn’t said anything.

“So I’m filling in your former position?” I asked Graham. Something flashed in his eyes, and he shared a look with Robin. “What?”

“Not exactly,” said Graham. “Until about a month ago, the post was held by Jim Crommetty. He was shot dead on the job. He was a good man, Swan; he had a wife, three kids. I want … no, I want _very badly_ the person who took him from us.”

I stared at his earnest face with some confusion until the shoe dropped. He thought I was a full and bona fide SO-5 operative on a rest-and-recuperation assignment. That wasn’t unusual. Back in Boston we used to get worn-out characters from SO-9 and SO-7 all the time. Without exception, each of them had been as nutty as squirrel poo.

“We need someone who, uh, how shall I put this?” Graham murmured, half to himself. “Someone who isn’t frightened to use _extreme force_ if necessary.”

I made a non-committed noise in understanding and wondered whether it would be better to come clean; after all, the only things I had shot recently were a car and a seemingly bullet-proof master criminal. And I was officially SO-26, not SO-5. But with the strong possibility of Pan still being around, and revenge high on my agenda, perhaps it would be better to play along.

“Do you have any idea who killed him?”

“Jim was a LiteraTech,” said Graham. “Five weeks ago, he received a call from someone who said that they had something for him to see. A rare Grimm Brothers manuscript. He went to see it and … well, he wasn’t armed, see.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photograph, planting it on the table for me to see. “Recognise him?”

I did. “George Spencer.”

“He showed up about two weeks ago. Wouldn’t say why or what he was doing here,” Robin told me, leaning in closer and lowering his voice. “What do you know about him?”

“Not much. He claimed to be QuangTech’s rep for SpecOps, but I knew he was lying.”

“You’ve got good instincts. To be fair to him, that was true for a long time. But as of three months ago, he’s the head of the Advanced Weapons Division. Eight billion annual budget, and it all goes through him.”

The news programme played over in my mind, the complete and utter devastation of an armoured tank with QuangTech’s fancy new toys.

“Eight billion?”

“And loose change. Rumour has it that they even went over _that_ budget to develop the plasma rifle. Let’s be honest, a guy like that wouldn’t be in Storybrooke unless there was something _really_ interesting here.”

 _Pan_ , I thought to myself. “What do you think he’s here for?” I asked, attempting to be cryptic. Robin saw straight through it.

“Dunno. Maybe he found it peculiar that a highly respected officer from Boston decided to take a deputy’s job in this little backwater. Or maybe Pan’s still around – or at least, QuangTech seem to _think_ he’s still around.”

“Worrying, isn’t it?” I replied simply.

After that, Robin and Graham finished off their drinks and bade me good night. They had made the points that they wanted to make: that I was welcome back in Storybrooke, they were keen to avenge the death of Jim Crommetty, and they did not like George Spencer. I told them that I would see them (well, Graham – Robin wasn’t supposed to be at the station, but I knew I would see him there anyway) in the morning. And then they were gone.

The jazz number came to an end as they left. I joined in the applause as Jefferson got shakily to his feet and waved at the little crowd before taking his exit. The diner thinned out considerably once the music had finished, leaving me almost alone. I looked over to the right, where two Miltons were busy making eyes at each other, and then at the inside bar, where several suited business reps were drinking as much as they could on their overnight allowances. I walked over to the piano and sat down, struck a few chords to test out my arm and steadily became more adventurous until I was playing the lower half of a duet almost on instinct. A few partially-interested eyes turned to me, but I ignored them. As the intro for the top part of the duet came around for the third time, a man’s hand reached in and struck the first note of the upper half exactly on time. I shut my eyes and kept playing; I knew who it was, but I wasn’t going to look up. If I did, I would probably melt. I could smell his aftershave, and noticed the long, jagged scar on his right forearm. The hair on the back of my neck bristled and I felt a flush rise within me as I instinctively moved to the left to let him sit down. His fingers drifted across the keys with mine, the two of us playing together damn near flawlessly. The Miltons looked on approvingly, and even the suited salesmen stopped talking and looked around to see who was playing.

Still I did not look up. As my hands grew more accustomed to that long-unplayed tune, I grew confident and began to play faster. He did not miss a note, keeping up the tempo perfectly.

We played like that for maybe ten minutes, and I did not dare look at him. I knew that if I did, I would smile and I did not want to do that. I wanted him to know that I was still pissed off. _Then_ he could attempt to charm me. When the piece at long last came to an end, I continued to stare ahead. He did not move.

“Hey, Neal,” I murmured after some time.

“Hey, Emma.”

I played a couple of notes absently, still fixated on the piano. “It’s been a while.”

“Ten years,” he replied, sounding as if his mind was worlds away.

His voice was exactly the same. The warmth and sensitivity I had once known so well were still there. I braved a glance, caught his gaze and looked away quickly. My eyes began to moisten. I flushed, embarrassed by my feelings and scratched my nose nervously.

He had gone slightly grey around the temples but still wore his hair in much the same way. There was a small collection of wrinkles around his eyes, but that could have just as easily been from smiling as from age. He had been twenty-six when I walked out; I had been twenty-three. I wondered whether I had aged as well as he had.

Was I too old to hold a grudge, I wondered. Getting into a strop with Neal wasn’t going to bring Leo back. I felt a sudden urge to yell, but as I opened my mouth the world juddered to a halt. The D sharp I had just pressed kept on resonating and Neal stared at me, his chocolate eyes frozen in mid-blink. Dad’s timing could not have been worse.

“Hello, sweetpea!” he said, emerging from the shadows. He noticed Neal. “Oh, sorry. Am I interrupting something?”

“Very much so.”

“I won’t be long then. What do you make of this?”

He handed me a long, yellow, curved thing that was about the size of a sweet potato.

“What is it?” I asked, giving the thing a cautious smell.

“It’s the fruit of a new plant designed completely from scratch exactly seventy years from now. Look–!” He peeled the skin off, revealing a soft white interior that he encouraged me to taste. It wasn’t bad. “Good, isn’t it? Marvellous feat of genetic engineering – you can pick it well before it’s ripe, transport it thousands of miles if necessary and it will keep fresh in its own hermetically sealed biodegradable packaging. It was sequenced by a brilliant engineer named Anna Bannon, but we’re a bit lost as to what to call it. Any ideas?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something. What are you going to do with it?”

“I thought I’d introduce it somewhere in the tenth millennium before now and see how it goes – food for mankind, that sort of thing. Well, time waits for no man, as we like say. I’ll let you get back to Neal.”

The world flickered back to a start. Neal finished blinking and looked at me.

“Banana,” I said, suddenly realising what it was that my father had shown me.

“Sorry?”

“Banana. They named it after the inventor.”

“Emma, what are you talking about?” Neal asked with a bemused grin.

“My dad was just here.”

“Oh. Is he still all of time?”

“Same as ever.”

“I missed you.”

I froze. Neal shuffled uneasily, perhaps realising that it had been the wrong thing to say. I went back to tapping on the keys.

“I missed you, too,” I admitted, not looking him in the eye. “The first year was the worst.”

I played a few more keys, neither of us saying anything. Eventually the silence got to me and I snapped, “Neal, what are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “This is my town too, Emma. When a friend comes for a visit, you look them up. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

“And you buy them flowers? Does Colonel Phoebus get lilies too?”

“No, daffodils. Old habits die hard.”

“I see you’ve been doing well for yourself,” I observed, gesturing at his well-fitted and expensive-looking suit. He hadn’t bothered with a tie, though, so his collar was open just enough to show a bit of his chest. I had to look back down at the piano.

“Thanks.” He tapped a finger on the keys. “You never answered my letters.”

“I never _read_ your letters.”

“Are you married?”

“I can’t see how that’s any of your business.”

“I take it that’s a no?”

The conversation had taken a turn for the worse, and my instincts told me it was time to bug out.

“Listen, I’m beat. I’ve had a long day and I have to get up early in the morning–”

I got up. Neal limped after me, his left leg making distinctive creaking noises. He was pretty used to the prosthetic by now so he caught up to me at the door.

“Can we have dinner one night?”

“Sure,” I answered non-committedly.

“Tuesday?”

I bit my lip, rethinking my answer. “No, Tuesday’s not good.” His face fell. So did my heart. “I just have a lot of things that I have to do and the car needs fixing so I have to go and pick that up sometime and my mom needs help with her hip–”

I checked myself. It had been less than half an hour and I was blabbering like an idiot already.

“And let me guess, you have to wash your hair?” Neal added.

“Very funny.”

“What sort of work are you doing here, anyway?”

“Washing up at SmileyBurger.”

“You took the empty deputy’s position, didn’t you?”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew that. Knowing Neal, it was probably just a wild guess anyway.

“Yes.”

“Permanently? Like, you’ve come back to Storybrooke for good?”

“I don’t know.”

His hand was an inch from mine. I instinctively jerked it back before it touched, because I already wanted to hug him and tell him that I still loved him and always would, like some emotional teenage girl. But the time just wasn’t right – and I could barely admit it to myself. So I decided to get on the question offensive and asked: “Are _you_ married?”

“No.”

“Never thought about it?”

“I’ve thought a lot about it.”

We both lapsed into silence. There was just too much to say and neither of us could think of where to start. Eventually Neal opened up a second front: “Want to go see _Richard III?_ ”

“Is it still running?”

“Of course.”

I nodded. “Well, it’s tempting but I don’t know when I’ll be free. Things are a bit … volatile at the moment.”

I knew he didn’t believe me. For a second, I thought I should ask him about Pan – the guy was supposedly related to him somehow, which meant that Neal (or Rumple, at least) should have known _something_ about him – but opening up that can of worms just didn’t seem wise. Neal sighed, dug a calling card out of his pocket and placed it on the windowsill.

“Alright. Call me? Whenever you’re free. Promise?”

“Promise.”

He made a jerky movement, as if he’d intended to kiss me on the cheek and then thought better of it. We looked at each other for a second; he was the one to break it by limping away. I was left staring down the street after him. I didn’t pick up his calling card. I didn’t have to. The number was one I hadn’t forgotten in fourteen years.

 

My room was exactly like all the others in the B&B. Faded floral wallpaper peeled off in some of the corners and there were landscapes hung up everywhere, painted by nostalgic Foresters. The room faced north; I could just see the forest in the light of the crescent moon. I heard a howl as I switched on the television just in time to catch _Today in Congress,_ which was basically an unscripted reality TV show called ‘real life’. The Kentucky debate had been raging all day and still wasn’t done. I emptied my pockets of loose change, removed my automatic from its holster and opened the bedside drawer. Aside from the Gideon Bible, there were also the teachings of Buddha, the GSD Standard Prayer Volume VI and a Wesleyan pamphlet, two bookmarks from the Society for Christian Awareness, the abridged version of _Gulliver’s Travels_ and the now mandatory _Complete Works of William Shakespeare._ I removed all of the books, stuffed them in the cupboard and placed my automatic in the drawer instead. I hadn’t rented out my apartment in Boston because I hadn’t made up my mind as to whether I was staying in Storybrooke or not. Oddly, the town had already started to feel very comfortable and I wasn’t sure if I liked that or not. I placed a couple of my own books on the desk and the life-saving copy of _Snow White_ on the bedside table. I picked up the photo of Neal and walked over to the bureau, thought for a minute – or maybe two – and then placed it upside down beneath my pistol. With the real thing around I had no need for an image. The TV droned on behind me:

“… Despite interventions from the Canadians and a Confederate guarantee of safe habitation for Union settlers, it looks as though the Union government will not be resuming its place around the table in Geneva. With the Union still adamant about an offensive using the new, so-called Pobble plasma rifle, peace will _not_  be descending on the Kentucky-Tennessee border any time soon …”

The newsreader shuffled some papers. “Now for news closer to home. A riot broke out in Atlantic City today as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the ninth anniversary of the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Harry Grubb. Harry, how are things down there?”

A shaky live picture came on the screen, and I stopped my organising to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been overturned and set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear. Harry Grubb, who was in training for the job of Civil War correspondent and secretly hoped that the war wouldn’t end before he had a chance to put boots on the ground, wore a navy blue cardigan and spoke with the urgent, halting speech of a news reporter in a war zone.

“Things are definitely heating up down here, Brian! I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone and I can see several overturned, burning cars. The police have been trying to keep the factions apart all day but the sheer weight of numbers is simply too much for them. This evening, several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the _N’est pas une pipe_ public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside have been chanting Italian Renaissance slogans and throwing stones at the defenders. The neo-surrealists have responded to the attacks by charging the lines protected by soft watches, and actually seemed to be winning until the police moved in. Hang on – I can see someone getting arrested! I’ll try and get an interview!”

I shook my head sadly and put some shoes in the bottom of the closet. It was a never-ending cycle; there was violence when surrealism was banned and violence when the bans were lifted. Grubb continued his broadcast as he intercepted a policewoman marching away a youth dressed in sixteenth-century garb with a faithful representation of the Hand of God from the Sistine Chapel tattooed on his face.

“Excuse me, sir, how would you counter the criticism that you are an intolerant bunch with little respect for the value of change and experimentation in all aspects of art?”

The Renaissancite glared at the camera. “You know, people say that we’re just Renaissancites causing trouble but I’ve seen Baroque kids, Raphaelites, Romantics and Mannerists here tonight. It’s a massive show of classical artistic unity against these frivolous bastards who cower beneath the safety of the word progress. It’s not just–”

He was cut off by the policewoman, who quickly dragged him away. Grubb dodged a flying brick and then wound up his report.

“This is Harry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network live from Atlantic City.”

I turned the television off using the remote chained to the bedside table, then sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie. Long blonde hair tumbled down my ears – I really needed to get it cut. I sniffed dubiously at my hair, rubbed my scalp and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Neal. Even with our differences we still had enough in common to be good friends.


	11. Storybrooke Police Station

‘… This morning Emma Swan joined us in Storybrooke – Crommetty’s replacement. She seems an entirely capable, charismatic and talented woman, but I cannot help but think that she is particularly unsuited to this area of work and I have my doubts as to whether she is as sane as she thinks she is. She has many demons – more than a few, I’m sure, associated with the lad she was playing the piano with earlier – and I wonder whether Storybrooke is the right place to try and exorcise them …”

Excerpt from Graham Humbert’s diary, dated 29 November 2016

 

When I had first lived in Storybrooke, the police station had been a one-room office, a jail block and a converted interrogation room one street down from the town hall. It had been upgraded since then – an extra wing had been added to the south side, along with a long-term detention centre and a proper lobby. In any other district, SpecOps headquarters were shared with the regular police. In Storybrooke, SpecOps _were_ the regular police.

I showed my ID to the security guard and walked, thankfully unhindered, to the front desk. I spotted a few familiar faces straight away. Roland Locksley, who was Robin’s only son and a few years my senior, brought in a heavily bearded man wearing a t-shirt with a howling wolf on it. He opened his mouth and started barking. Roland waved hello and I waved back. I figured I could catch him later.

At the front desk, I stood in line behind a man in a baggy white shirt and breeches remonstrating with the desk sergeant. The officer just stared at him, bored. He’d heard it all before.

“Name?” asked the desk sergeant wearily.

“John Milton.”

“ _Which_ John Milton?”

The Milton sighed. “Four hundred and ninety-six.”

“Mmm-hmm.” The sergeant made a note in his book. “And how much did they take?”

“Two hundred in cash and all my credit cards.”

“Have you notified your bank?”

“Of course.”

“And you think your assailant was a Percy Shelley?”

“Yes,” snapped the Milton. “He handed me this pamphlet on rejecting current religious dogma before he ran off.”

“Hey, Grub,” I interrupted.

The sergeant looked at me, paused for a moment and then broke into a huge grin.

“Emma! Hey! They told me you were on your way back! Told me you’d made it all the way to SO-5, too!”

I returned his smile. Grubby was the eldest son of my mom’s friend Grumpy (yes, that’s the dwarf) and the first dwarf to be born out of the Enchanted Forest. Apparently nobody even knew that dwarves _could_ reproduce sexually before Grubby came along – well, I don’t really like to think about it too much. Despite being half-fairy, Grub looked like a dwarf – short, stocky and muscular – but his secret shame was that he had never, in his twenty-seven years of existence, been able to grow a beard.

“What are you doing back?” he asked, much to the Milton’s annoyance. “Starting up a regional office? SO-9 or something? Add a touch of spice to tired ol’ Storybrooke?”

“No, I’m still NCD. I’m taking the deputy’s job.”

A look of doubt crossed Grub’s face but he quickly hid it. “Great!” he enthused, a little uneasily. “Drink later?”

I agreed happily and, after making sure the offices were still where I remembered, left Grub to argue with Milton 496.

The new south wing was subdivided into three general office spaces – one for the sheriff, one to be shared between the deputies and other SO-26 operatives, and one that was sort of spare since Ruby didn’t use it much. She preferred a dark and slightly fetid lock-up in the basement. The corridor was packed with bookcases and filing cabinets; the new carpet was already worn through the middle. It was a far cry from the NCD office in Boston, where – despite the cramped facilities – we had enjoyed the most up-to-date information retrieval systems. I reached the correct door and knocked. I didn’t receive an answer so I walked straight in.

The room was a mix of proper policing on one side, and a library from a country house on the other. Shelves crammed full of books – Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Mother Goose, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and American poetry – covered three walls entirely and were encroaching on the fourth. There were three desks laid out in an open plan style; one was piled high with even more books and papers, the second was frugal in decoration with only a photograph frame and a computer, and the third was completely empty. I stared at it, feeling a cold chill. I wasn’t supernumerary; another cop had been killed in the line of duty and I was taking his place. Filling in a dead man’s shoes, sitting in a dead man’s chair … I shivered. I really couldn’t think about that too much.

There was only one other person in the room, talking on the phone at the book-covered desk. I waved hello. Cassandra Cole shot me a smile back.

“Well, I’m very sorry that you don’t like _Titus Andronicus_ , madam,” she told the person on the other end of the line, giving me a look and rolling her eyes, “but I’m afraid it’s got nothing to do with us. Perhaps you should consider sticking to the comedies in the future?”

I stifled a laugh. Cassandra was an old friend; we went through police training together, although she had ultimately ended up a LiteraTech, and her brother Jason had been in my unit in Kentucky. Years later I’d found out that the two of them had _almost_ been my siblings, since Dad and Cassandra’s mother – formerly Princess Abigail, now Abigail Cole the lawyer – had been previously engaged. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The door opened again and Graham walked through, humming over some files. He almost walked straight into me.

“Oh, sorry,” he apologised profusely as we both bent down to tidy up the runaway files and a dusty old book. “Another one of yours, Cassie. _The Vanity of Human Wishes._ ”

Cassandra groaned. “Great.”

“Johnson forgeries?” I asked, flicking through the book’s yellowed pages. They both nodded. “We picked up something like this in Boston a couple months ago. Two pallets of forged _A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland_ , with a street value of over three hundred thousand dollars.”

“Boston _too_?” exclaimed Cassandra, eliciting another groan. “I’ve been after this gang for six months; I thought they were local.”

“Call Briggs at the Boston office; he’ll help in any way he can. Just mention my name.”

Cassandra picked up the phone and asked the operator for a number. Graham beckoned me over to the empty desk.

“So, you’ve met the gang. Me, Cassie, Roland and Grub are all the full-timers; Mulan does three days a week but her back’s giving her trouble, so I’m trying to keep her off the heavy stuff. Cassie takes care of everything related to literary crime, you and Roland are in charge of all NCD stuff, and Grub runs wherever we need him. Ruby is more or less in charge of herself, but we see her from time to time. Plus six volunteer rangers in hunting season. This is yours.”

I nodded, eyed the empty desk carefully and then opened the drawer. There was nothing in it; not even so much as a pencil shaving. Graham was watching me.

“I emptied it the morning after Crommetty’s murder.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

Graham scratched his head before answering. “Jim worked mainly in nineteenth-century prose and poetry. He was a good officer, but a tad excitable. Didn’t have a lot of time for procedure. Yeah, that type. Anyway, he vanished one evening when he said he’d had a tip-off about a rare manuscript. We found him a week later out the back of the abandoned Raven public house on Swift Road. He’d been shot six times in the face.”

“My God.”

“I’ve lost friends before,” said Graham, his voice never wavering from the measured pace of speech he used, “but Jim was a close friend and colleague and I would have gladly taken his place.”

He rubbed his nose; it was the only sign of outward emotion he had shown. I watched carefully. There was something about the rigid way Graham held himself that suggested there was a bit more to it, but I decided I could try to get it out of him later.

“Oh, and before I forget; the regional commander is visiting from Augusta. Oskar Weselton. He leaves us alone most of the time, which is how we like it, but he does like to see all new operatives whenever he gets the chance. He’s down the corridor; Meeting Room one.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’d keep your automatic out of sight,” Graham advised, looking pointedly at my gun. “Despite Jim’s untimely death, the commander doesn’t like seeing anybody outside of Riot Control permanently armed.”

I thanked him again, left my automatic in the desk drawer and walked down the corridor. I found the right room, knocked and received a call of “Enter!”

Commander Oskar Weselton was a short, thin man with a large moustache, wire-rimmed spectacles and a grey complexion. He had bags under his eyes; it looked to me as though he was about ten years overdue for retirement. When I entered, he was sitting at the head of the meeting table reading through a manila folder with my name and an SO-5 stamp on the front; obviously, he and Graham didn’t get along well enough to swap information between clearances. I cleared my throat. He looked up, smiled genially and gestured for me to sit down.

“Nice to meet you, Officer Swan. Cigarette?”

“I don’t, thank you.”

“Good, neither do I.”

Something in my file obviously interested him; he continued to read, drumming his long fingers on the table.

“Quite a record you’ve got, Swan,” he murmured, eyes flicking across the pertinent points of my career. “Fourteen foster homes in sixteen years, police academy, dropped out to join the army, Kentucky, rejoined the police, moved to Boston in 2007. Why was that?”

“Advancement, sir.”

Weselton stroked his moustache thoughtfully and continued reading. “SpecOps, Nursery Crime Division for eight years, twice commended. Recently loaned to SO-5. Your stay with the latter has been heavily censored. It says here that you were wounded in action.”

He looked over his spectacles at me. “Did you return fire?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

“I fired first.”

“Not so good.”

He grunted and closed the file. “My responsibility as Maine Regional Commander is not only the NCD and LiteraTechs, but also Art Theft, Environmental Agency, Vampirism and Lycanthropy, ChronoGuard, Antiterrorism, Civil Order and the Pasta Police. Do you play golf?”

“No, sir.”

“Shame, shame. Where was I? Oh, yes. Out of all of those departments, do you know which one I fear most?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. None of them. The thing I fear most is SpecOps regional budget meetings. Do you know what that means, Swan?”

“No, sir.”

“It means that every time one of you puts in for extra overtime or a special request, I go over budget and it makes my head hurt, right _here._ ” He jabbed a pencil-like finger at his left temple. “Do you understand?”

“Yessir.”

Weselton picked up my file and waved it at me. “I heard you had a spot of bother in the big city, Swan. Other operatives getting killed, and whatnot. I want you to understand that it’s a whole new, alternative, _different_ kettle of fish out here. We’re an unimportant backwater in the middle of nowhere, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. No memorials to crazy lunatics, no attempts to bump up tourism, no running around shooting bad guys, no overtime and _definitely_ no twenty-four-hour surveillance operations. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I repeated, fighting the urge to laugh. I had thought Briggs was bad, but he was a philanthropist compared to this guy. I wondered what would happen if I introduced him to Jack.

“Now, about this Peter Pan.”

My heart leapt; I had thought _that_ would have been censored, if anything.

“I understand that you believe he is still alive?”

I thought for a moment. My eyes flicked to the file Weselton was holding. He divined my thoughts.

“Oh, that’s not in here, my dear girl. No, certainly not. I may only be a hick commander out in the boonies, but I do have my sources. You think he is still alive?”

I knew I could trust Robin, and was feeling better about Graham, but about Weselton I was not so sure. And from the way he bore into me, gaze locked over the rims of his glasses, I thought it was better not to risk it.

“A symptom of stress, sir. Peter Pan is dead.”

Weselton’s eyes narrowed. He plonked my file in the out-tray, leant back in his chair and stroked his moustache, something he obviously enjoyed. “So you’re not here to try and find him then?”

“Sir, with all due respect, even if Pan were alive, what possible reason could he have for coming to Storybrooke?”

“Familiarity, I suppose. Isn’t he a PDR like yourself?”

I grit my teeth and didn’t respond. _Polite_ conversation dictates that one doesn’t remind another of something like that until you’ve at least bought them a drink. Or three.

Thankfully, Weselton’s cell phone rang. He checked the number, then stood up to usher me out of the meeting room.

“Well, run along. One piece of advice: learn how to play golf. I think you should find it to be a rewarding and relaxing game. This is a copy of your division’s budget account and this is a list of all the local golf courses. Study up. Good luck.”

He shut the door abruptly behind me.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” said Cassandra when I got back to the office. Roland was back too; he waved hello from his desk. “Did he mention the budget?”

“I don’t think he talked about anything else. Do you have a trash can?”

She smiled and pushed it out with her foot. I dumped the heavy document in it unceremoniously.

“Bravo,” she said.

“Hey, Emma,” Roland greeted, finishing whatever he was typing before standing up to give me a hug. “Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back,” I told him. “What’s new?”

“Let’s see: Congress is debating a new deficit bill, as if that’ll change anything. The mayor’s competing for a government grant to make some much-needed upgrades to the school. The Dodgers are favoured to take the pennant, but in much more important news, my son’s got his first tooth.”

He flicked through the photos on his phone to show me one of a smiling ten-month-old baby.

“Oh, my God, is that Ollie? When did he get so big?”

I don’t mind pictures of drooling infants when they belong to somebody I know. Although I did wonder just then whether my father might be pulling some strings to send me an unsubtle hint.

“About a month ago,” said Roland proudly. “He’s not quite walking yet, but he’s crawling like crazy.”

“That’s great. Where’s the old man?”

“I stuck him with babysitting duty so he’d stay at home. It’s just as well; Audrey hasn’t had a day to herself in six months.”

I was about to shut the door behind me when a short man in a blue suit came powering down the hall, talking on his phone and not looking where he was going. He bumped against my shoulder, took no notice, and then barged into the meeting room where Weselton was without a word.

“Well, well,” I murmured. “George Spencer.”

“You know him?” asked Roland.

“Not socially, no.”

“About as much charm as an open grave,” Cassandra growled, curling her nose. “He’s been around a couple of times. Actually, more than usual. Three times just the past week.”

I looked down the hall to the closed meeting room door. “Do you know what he’s here for?”

“None whatsoever.” Cassandra shrugged. Then she received another call from the person who hated _Titus Andronicus._ I left her to it, and Roland to his report.

I sat down at the empty desk, ignoring the sudden chill. There seemed to be a lot going on in the office that I wasn’t a part of. Graham came back, but it wasn’t until he put a hand on my shoulder that I actually noticed. I jumped.

“Sorry,” he said, grinning boyishly. “Did you get the commander’s budget speech?”

“And more. George Spencer walked into the room like he owned the place.”

Graham shrugged. “He’s QuangTech. Chances are he does.”

I then noticed that he had his jacket folded neatly across his arm. “Are we going somewhere?”

“It’s your first day. Thought I’d treat you to lunch. Then the next suspect on my list for Crommetty’s murder. You got a car?”

 

‘Impressed’ wasn’t the word I’d use when Graham saw my old yellow bug, which I’d only picked up from the mechanic’s that morning.

“This is hardly what one might refer to as ‘low profile’, Emma.”

“On the contrary,” I replied. “Who would have thought that a cop would drive a car like this? Besides, I have to drive it.”

He got in the passenger side and looked around, slightly disdainfully, at the spartan interior. Then he looked at me. “There a problem? You’re staring.”

Now that Graham was in the car I suddenly realised where I had seen him before. He had been in the passenger seat when the car appeared in front of me at the hospital. Events had indeed started to fall into place.


	12. Belle Flashes Upon the Inward Eye

‘I think Mr Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. After all, it can’t be usual that you pop into your favourite memory only to see someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.”

Belle Gold, interview for _The Sunday Mirror_

 

While I was across town dealing with Spencer, and Graham, and Weselton, in my usual way, Rumple and Belle were hard at work on their project in the family’s garage. As I was to learn later, it was going pretty well. To begin with, at any rate.

Rumplestiltskin was fiddling with the brass apparatus while Belle scrawled mathematical calculations of incomprehensible complexity onto an old blackboard.

“Okay, I think I’ve got the answer!”

“Excellent!” Rumplestiltskin grunted while chewing on the end of a well-worn pencil. “What is it?”

“Nine.”

“Hmm.” He murmured to himself, pushed his glasses up his nose and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the brass-reinforced book that Neal had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem, _I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud._ Then he hung it from the wall, next to the blackboard, and began to connect the heavy mains feed to the appropriate outlets on the sides of the book. He signalled to his wife, who switched the power to ‘on’; silvery-blue lights arced around the book, which started to vibrate. Rumplestiltskin quickly adjusted the myriad of knobs and dials on the book’s front. Despite the portal being largely a bio-psychomechanism, there were still many delicate procedures that had to be set before it would work; and since it was of an absurd complexity, which happened when one attempted to cross realms, as Rumplestiltskin knew all too well, he was forced to write the precise start-up sequence into a primary school exercise book of which, ever wary of foreign spies, he held the only copy.. He studied the book carefully before twisting one dial here, flicking one switch there, and gently increasing the power flow until the vibrating subsided. Belle looked on sceptically.

“Are you sure this is safe?”

“I wouldn’t send _you_ if I didn’t think so,” he said, planting a kiss on her cheek. “You read me into _The Wreck of the Hesperus_ without any problems.”

“I’m still trying to get the saltwater smell out of your shirt!” Belle chided him, remembering the floppy, wet mess that had emerged on their living room floor all too well. Rumplestiltskin gave her a smile. “And you left your jacket behind! I liked that one!”

“It's safe, I’m sure. You and I went over Jefferson’s modifications _together_ , remember? It’ll work.”

“You really think so?” Belle asked, squeezing his hands and looking at him expectantly. He nodded.

“Of course I do.”

She barely managed to keep herself from squealing with excitement. “But this means–”

“We may soon have a way to go home.”

For over two hundred years, Rumplestiltskin had searched and searched for a way to cross realms to find his lost son. Not for a second had he ever thought he would have to try and travel in the other direction. The Dark Curse hadn’t exactly gone as planned – to this day, he still wasn’t sure that it had actually been cast at all, and with Regina in a high-security lockup somewhere in Colorado he couldn’t get any details out of her – but he had landed in the Land Without Magic nonetheless. It had taken another eighteen years before he was reunited with Baelfire, as being on the wrong side of the planet and without magic had slowed _that_ process considerably. He gazed adoringly at his wife, remembering those rough first years when they had both been adjusting to life in an unknown land, with no magic, no curse and limited knowledge of how the Land Without Magic worked. He had been depressed and angry a lot of the time, and still couldn't quite believe that this amazing woman had actually stuck with him for all this time; let alone _married_ him and raised three incredible children with him. But he and Belle both knew that they didn’t really belong in this world, nor did any other Enchanted Forester who had unwittingly wound up stuck in their new land.

Whether he and Belle went home would depend on what Baelfire, Gabrielle, Nicholas and Gideon all wanted – Rumplestiltskin had spent two hundred years without one child and was not about to be separated from any of them again. But there were plenty of others who would jump at the opportunity. Maybe it was just thirty-three years without the Dark Curse sucking away at his morality – and his wife’s all-to-good nature wearing off on him - but Rumplestiltskin figured that it was his fault they were all stuck; the least he could do was find a way for them to return home.

So, he and Belle had come up with the idea to build a portal. It started with a dinner at Jefferson’s house, and a late-night (slightly drunken) recollection of the first time Belle had become aware of her own portal-jumping abilities – by accidentally reading herself and Gideon, then just a baby, into a copy of _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_. Sometimes, Rumplestiltskin still had to laugh at the irony; he’d spent all that time steadily refining Regina to cast the curse when a possible solution had been right underneath his nose – literally – for four years. They still weren’t sure whether Belle’s powers gave her the ability to jump into another _world_ , or just to a world within a book, which was why they were seeking to combine her abilities with Jefferson’s – the result being the metallic brass book hanging on their garage wall.

“Shall we give it a try, my dear?”

“You’re sure it’s safe?” she asked again. Just to be sure.

“Well, it is _possible_ , however remote, that we might accidentally start a chain reaction that will fuse all matter and annihilate the entire universe.”

Belle stared at him. Rumplestiltskin chuckled.

“It’s a joke, sweetheart.”

“I would hope so.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Rumplestiltskin pressed a large green button on the side of the book, which started to drone like a swarm of bees. Belle put on her glasses – a recent development that she was still getting used to, and Rumplestiltskin found did unhealthy things to his concentration at inopportune moments – and began to read Wordsworth’s century-old words aloud.

“ _I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils–_ ”

There was a bright flash and a burst of heavy electrical discharge; two small balls of highly charged gas plasma formed spontaneously near the machine and barrelled out in two directions. Rumplestiltskin had to dodge one, which sailed past him and burst on the bonnet of the Cadillac, leaving a football-sized circle of melted paint; the other exploded on his workbench and started a small fire. Just as quickly, the light and sound died away and the garage lights flickered up to full brightness again. Rumplestiltskin stared at the spot where his wife had disappeared, and whooped proudly. Had it worked? Well, he would know soon enough. He started a two-minute egg timer – that was the time they had agreed upon in advance for Belle to return – and patted his pockets for his pipe until he remembered with dismay that it too was still inside _Hesperus,_ so instead he sat down on Gabi’s prototype of a sarcasm early-warning device and waited. Everything, so far, was working _extremely_ well.

 

On the other side of the portal, Belle found herself on the grassy bank of a large lake where the water gently lapped against the shore. The sun was shining brightly and small puffy clouds floated lazily across the azure sky. Along the edge of the water, she could see thousands upon thousands of vibrant yellow daffodils, all growing in the dappled shade of a birch grove. A breeze, carrying with it the sweet scent of spring, caused the flowers to flutter and dance like fairies at a Spring Festival. All around her, a feeling of peace and tranquillity ruled. The world she stood in now was unsullied by man’s evil or malice. Here, indeed, was paradise.

Belle laughed aloud and did a little dance. This felt nothing like jumping into her books, where – beautiful as those worlds had always been – everything felt not quite right, and she entirely out of place. No, this world was real, from the heat of the sun on her face to the cool prickling of the grass under her feet, the sounds of far-off songbirds and the smell of flowering daffodils. A real world, another realm! It had _worked_!

“It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed, finally able to produce a coherent sentence. Oh, how she wished Rumple could see this. “The flowers, the colours, the scent – it’s like breathing champagne!”

“You like it, madam?”

She spun around to see a man of about eighty watching her. He was dressed in a black cloak and wore a half-smiled upon his weathered features. He gazed lovingly at the flowers.

“I often come here,” he said, “whenever the doldrums of depression fall heavy on my countenance.”

“You’re very fortunate,” Belle told him. “We have to rely on _Name That Fruit!_ ”

“ _Name That Fruit?_ ”

“It’s a quiz show. On the telly. Oh, right.” She smacked herself on the forehead. “You wouldn’t know.”

The old man looked at her without comprehension, then asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, sorry for intruding,” Belle said quickly. “My name is Belle Gold. My husband and I are trying to find a way back home. To the Enchanted Forest.”

“By world-jumping into nineteenth-century works of poetry?”

“It’s a theory our friend Jefferson had. That the Enchanted Forest is a place created by the imaginations of writers over centuries, if not millennia. If we could just find a way to bypass the barrier between our world and the lands of imagination, then we might be able to go home. From the looks of things–” Belle slowly turned in a circle, drinking in her surroundings once more – “I think it worked.”

The figure in black smiled at her. “The inward eye is all I have left,” he said wistfully. “Everything that I once was is now here; my life is contained in my words. A life in volumes of prose; it is poetic.”

He sighed deeply and added: “But solitude isn’t always blissful, you know.”

The memory of another lonely man came to Belle’s mind, and she smiled understandingly.

“How long since I died?” the man asked abruptly.

“Over a hundred and fifty years.”

“Really? Tell me, how did the revolution in France turn out?”

“It’s too early to tell.”

Wordsworth frowned as the sun went in. “Hello,” he muttered. “I don’t remember writing that–”

Belle looked. A large, dark and thunderous-looking raincloud had blotted out the sun.

“What do you–” she began, but when she looked back around Wordsworth was gone. The sky grew darker and thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. A strong wind sprang up, the lake seemed to freeze over and lose all depth, and the daffodils stopped moving, becoming a solid mass of yellow and green. She cried out in fear as the sky and the lake met; the daffodils, trees and clouds returning their places in the poem, individual words, sounds, squiggles and no meanings other than those with which mankind’s imagination can clothe them. She let out a final terrified scream as the darkness swept on and the poem closed on top of her.

 

The portal stopped droning suddenly. Rumplestiltskin got up and walked over; the egg timer still had over thirty seconds left and it wasn’t like Belle to emerge from one of her favourite works prematurely. But the time elapsed and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

“Belle?” Rumplestiltskin called anxiously, just in case she had popped out somewhere else in the house. There was no reply, and the portal was definitely closed. “Belle!”

Then somebody laughed – manically, psychotically – and a dark shadow appeared across the blackboard. Rumplestiltskin felt a cold chill deep in his bones. He turned slowly; four feet away was the grinning, boyish face that haunted his second-worst nightmares, and he was twirling the unplugged power cord between his fingers.

“Hello, laddie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, if you're enjoying this story, may I suggest checking out some of my other works? (Please? :D) 'There But for the Grace of God' is a (hopefully improved) rewrite of Season 3b in which Neal doesn't die, characters like Belle and Robin are actually relevant to the plot, and Hook spends the majority of his time unconscious beneath a pub counter; and 'Be All My Sins Remember'd' is the continuation of that, a rewrite of Season 4 that I'm posting currently! Anyways, just thought I'd mention it!


	13. The Chapel on Beacon Hill

THIS PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 (This is a joke from the source material. Tune in to see what happens next in a month)

 

 

 

 


	14. Hello & Goodbye, Mr Elwood

‘Few people remember Mr Elwood anymore. If you had read Joseph Jacob’s original _Jack and the Beanstalk_ prior to 2016, the peculiar old man would have returned in the climax of the story, revealed to be Jack’s long-lost father. Sadly, he no longer features past the opening sequences and only as a beanseller with a strange desire to own a cow.’

Sidney Glass, _The Nursery Crime Casebook,_ Volume 4

 

“Astonishing!” Pan exclaimed excitedly as he surveyed the portal. “Absolutely impressive, laddie! I wish I’d known that you had it in you earlier!”

Rumplestiltskin said nothing. He was too busy wondering if Belle was alright since the poem had closed on her. Pan had pulled the plug, collapsing the portal, before she could come back, and Rumplestiltskin had no way of knowing what that would do. Belle couldn’t make another portal from the other side – until Wordsworth had written any books into his daffodil world, which was doubtful – which meant her only way back was to re-open the portal. That was if she was even still alive.

They had blindfolded him for the entire journey, and now he was seated in the smoking lounge of what had once been a large and luxurious hotel. Although clearly still grand, the décor was tatty and worn. The pearl-inlaid piano didn’t look as though it had been tuned for many years, covered in a light layer of dust, and the mirror-backed bar was sadly devoid of any refreshment. Rumplestiltskin chanced a look out of a nearby window for a clue as to his whereabouts. It wasn’t difficult to guess. The absence of any advertisement hoardings, loud bohemian music playing from a restaurant strip on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, and the turrets of a French-style fortress just visible on the cloudy skyline, told him everything he needed to know: he was in the Free Dominion of Canada. Overall, perhaps better off politically and economically than in the Union States, but then he was trapped in the presence of his demonic father, so it balanced out in the end. The possibility of escape was slim – not for the first time, Rumplestiltskin wished he still had magic – and even if he could get away from Pan, what chance did a penniless cripple have evading the border guards? It was all moot anyway, since he could never leave without Belle – she was still imprisoned in the poem, which was now little more than printed words on a piece of paper pressed inside Pan’s suit pocket.

Lacking a vast array of choices, Rumplestiltskin bit his lip and turned his attention to the other people in the room. Besides himself and Pan, there were four others – and two of them had guns pointed straight at him.

“It’s good to see you again, Rumple,” said Pan with false warmth, leaning against the table with the portal on it so that he was between Rumplestiltskin and the device. “It’s been a while.”

“A few hundred years, not counting your rather rude interruption in New York,” Rumplestiltskin replied coolly. To add insult to hurt, Pan had taken Gold’s adopted name as his own that day – _Malcolm Gold,_ obscure relative – just to remind his son that he could never escape his grasp. Not really. “What have you been up to, _Papa_?”

“My boy, I’m hurt,” said Pan, laying a hand on his heartless chest. “All these years, you never even thought to check up on your dear old father?”

“I could say the same for you about your son.”

“True, true. Well, I’ll show you.”

Next to the portal was a pile of newspapers. Pan selected one at random, flicked it open and showed Rumplestiltskin the headlines.

PETER PAN: 78 WEEKS AT TOP OF BRITAIN’S MOST-WANTED LIST

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Pan proudly, as if he were talking about a much-beloved cake recipe rather than extortion and grand larceny. “How about this one, then?”

 _DAILY OWL_ READERS VOTE PETER PAN ‘MOST HATED PERSON ON THE PLANET’

“The _Washington Post_ said that execution was too good for me and the _Telegraph_ wanted the English Parliament to reinstate breaking on the wheel,” he continued, showing Rumplestiltskin the relevant snippets. “What do you think?”

“I think you should have stayed in Neverland.”

Pan huffed. “I would have, if not for your idiot son. But, guess what? No hard feelings! In fact, I’m prepared to say that Baelfire did me a great favour! It only stays fun for so long before you get tired of the same old jungle, same old cave systems, same old unmoving stars. I rather like this world. And monetary gain is all well and good too, but frankly, it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. I like the _fame_ , laddie. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good, as I’m sure you know –”

“I want to go home.”

“Of course!” Pan announced, spreading his arms wide. “Mr Smee, open the door.”

The man nearest to the door opened it and stepped aside.

“I don’t speak French,” murmured Rumplestiltskin dejectedly.

At Pan’s order, Smee shut the door.

“Bit of a drawback in Quebec, old boy,” said Pan. “You wouldn’t get far without it.”

“My wife speaks it.”

“Ah, yes. Dear little Belle.” He pulled the copy of _I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud_ from his pocket and produced a large gold lighter, which he ignited with a flourish.

Despite the pain in his leg, Rumplestiltskin was on his feet in an instant. “ _NO –!_ ”

Pan’s eyebrow arched, the flame licking the paper dangerously.

“I’ll stay and I’ll help you.”

“Excellent!” said Pan, shutting the lighter and tossing it away. He slipped the poem back into his pocket. “You won’t regret this.”

He thought for a moment.

“Actually, you probably will.”

A hand landed on Rumplestiltskin’s shoulder, violently shoving him back onto the chair. He complied purely because he had no strength to do otherwise, and let out a gasp of pain.

“Now, now, Killian,” said Pan, wagging a finger at the person behind Rumplestiltskin. “We agreed, remember?”

“I waited three hundred years for my revenge,” snapped a voice that – despite becoming husky with age – Rumplestiltskin still would have recognised anywhere. His blood went cold. “Give me a reason to wait one second longer –”

“Later, later,” Pan insisted, waving him down as one might do to a troublesome dog. “I have work to do and no desire to watch two senile old men attempt to duel each other.”

Killian Jones stepped into Rumplestiltskin’s frame of sight. The years had not been as kind to him as they had to Pan. Long, matted grey hair fell about his face, disguising the liver spots that weren’t covered by his uneven beard. Alcoholism had taken its toll in the form of waxy skin, permanently bloodshot eyes and a pot belly that could have birthed a baby troll. He still had his signature hook – it was the only thing remaining in pristine condition.

“Did you miss me, Crocodile?”

“May I suggest you look in the mirror before you call me that?” Rumplestiltskin retorted, fighting down a wave of disgust. That only made Jones angry, and he would have stepped towards Rumplestiltskin again if Pan hadn’t held him back.

“How about I introduce you to the rest of my fiendish compatriots?” Pan suggested. Nobody agreed, but he continued anyway: “Killian you obviously remember. The man with the gun over there is his deckhand Mr William Smee. His obedience is matched only by his stupidity. A simple trick with spring water and ambrosia, restored youth – for as long as I choose to grant it, of course – and the man sees to my every whim and fancy. He would die for me if necessary. A sort of human red setter, if you will. Mr Smee, tell me, have you committed your wicked act for today?”

“Yes, Mr Pan. I drove at fifty-two miles per hour.”

Pan frowned in disappointment. “That doesn’t sound very wicked.”

“Through the St-Jean-Baptiste?”

Pan wagged an approving finger. “I like it. Good man.”

“Thank you.”

“Over there is Mr Gregory Mendel, sometimes known as Owen Flynn depending on the situation. He’s busy talking to one of our ground operatives and I shan’t disturb him.”

Rumplestiltskin glanced at the man talking on the hotel’s old landline. If he listened carefully, it sounded like a woman’s voice coming out of the telephone.

“The third feller is Henry Jekyll, a doctor I befriended after he was struck off. The particulars are a bit sordid. We’ll talk about it over dinner sometime, as long as it’s not steak tartar. And this fine young fellow,” Pan announced, slapping the fourth man proudly on the back, “is my oldest friend in the world. Felix7, who can remember no farther than a week in the past and has no aspirations at all for the future. He thinks only of the task he has been assigned and will stop at nothing to see it done. One of my most masterful creations, if I do say so myself. We should have more men like him.”

Pan clapped his hands together happily. “Shall we get to work, gents? I haven’t committed a singularly debauched act for almost an hour!”

Rumplestiltskin was indignantly hauled to his feet by Jones, who then threw his walking stick at him with no mercy. With Jekyll’s pistol nudging him between the shoulder blades, Rumplestiltskin followed the criminals upstairs to one of the hotel’s larger rooms. It had been cleaned up and repaired enough to look like a lavish suite, with old Victorian-era upholstery, kerosene lamps and wide bay windows that provided a picturesque view of the Saint Lawrence. But it was the bookshelves that caught Rumplestiltskin’s attention; the room was thick with the smell of the old manuscripts piled high on the shelves, their yellowing pages protected from the elements by leather coverings bound with red ribbon. There was one on the table, spidery writing on the cover reading: _English Fairy-Tales, Joseph Jacobs._

Rumplestiltskin stared, agape. “Is that –?”

“Mr Jacob’s original manuscript, yes,” said Pan. “Not easy to find, let me tell you. As are the rest of these. _This_ one in particular may interest you.”

He produced another manuscript from the shelf and handed it to Rumplestiltskin. _La Belle et la Bête,_ the title read, along with the author’s name. _Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve._

“See, your wife’s realm-jumping abilities, similar to Mr Hatter’s, are somewhat limited,” Pan continued. “Mr Hatter cannot access worlds where magic is non-existent, and then he can only transport a set number of people at any one time. As for our dear Belle, well, she can only touch what I call a _pocket realm_ – an entirely self-sustained world inside the imagination of the reader. The experience may be extremely vivid, even _seeming_ to be another world in descriptive works as, say, a poem, but not really another realm. Unless, of course, you happen to have the original manuscript –”

“Which could open a portal to another world,” Rumplestiltskin finished for him, torn between agony and delight. It had to be; the missing piece they had been searching for.

“Bingo,” said Pan, clicking his fingers in triumph. Rumplestiltskin turned on him.

“How in the hell did _you_ ever figure this out?” he demanded. He and Belle had spent _months_ working on the project in secret; even the kids didn’t know about it. How had Pan figured out the key?

Pan just shrugged. “The same way I knew about your little project. I have my sources. Now, shall we get this portal assembled?”

“I need access to the main power line.”

“Over here,” said Dr Jekyll, producing a thick line of cable from under the carpet. Rumplestiltskin had him hang the portal from the wall and reluctantly got to work connecting the power; all the while Pan flicked through the manuscript of _English Fairy-Tales_ , skipping through the chapters until he found what he was looking for.

“Here,” Pan announced, showing Rumplestiltskin the appropriate section. “I want you to open the portal just here.”

It was the tale of _Jack and the Beanstalk;_ specifically, the part where a mysterious trader named Mr Elwood appeared and traded Jack magic beans for his cow.

“I need the page.”

Pan carefully unbound it. Rumplestiltskin slotted it into place, and continued wiring the portal.

“See, another marvellous effect of using a _book_ as a portal to another realm is that it allows you to choose not just _where_ , but _when_ you appear,” said Pan, grinning like the devil incarnate. “And to alter anything in the original manuscript –”

“You would change the story entirely!” Rumplestiltskin exclaimed, the pieces of his father’s plans falling into place. “You fiend!”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, lad.”

“You’re going to kill people!”

“That,” said Pan, jabbing him with a finger, “is entirely the point. Imagine, being able to snuff out a life anywhere, at any time? Not a single fairy-tale or nursery-rhyme character would be safe. What good is extortion if you can’t show everyone what massive damage you could do with a flick of a hand? I suppose I could just rob a bank, but that’s boring. Bang, bang, give me the money? Killing civilians is like shooting rabbits that have been pegged to the ground. Give me a SWAT platoon to deal with any day. Now, is it ready?”

Rumplestiltskin grudgingly nodded. “I just have to press this button.”

“Excellent!”

He sighed deeply. There was a chance that it wouldn’t work – it was Belle’s portal-jumping power that fed the device, but Rumplestiltskin had foolishly designed a buffer that would allow subsequent portals to open from just one reading. That particular aspect was untested and might not work – but if it didn’t, then Pan would torch the poem. On the other hand, he couldn’t tell Pan that it was really Belle whose power fuelled the portal, or he would make Rumplestiltskin retrieve his wife and then make _Belle_ do it. He was not going to let a man’s death sit on his wife’s conscience. Not now, not ever.

“God, forgive me –”

“ _I_ forgive you,” replied Pan. “It’s the closest you’re going to get!”

The door to the room opened and in walked Mendel, now dressed from head-to-toe in combat gear. He had a webbing harness around his waist, upon which hung a variety of items that might be useful on an unplanned armed robbery – a large torch, bolt cutters, rope, handcuffs and a semi-automatic pistol.

“You know who it is you are after?”

“Mr Elwood, sir.”

“Ah, yes, poor little Jack’s dear, absent father,” said Pan with glee. “I believe I do feel a speech coming on!”

He climbed onto the carved oak table. “My friends, today is a great day for science and a bad one for folk tales! We stand on the very brink of an act of artistic barbarism so monstrous that I am almost ashamed of it myself! All of you have been my faithful comrades for many years – many centuries for some of you – and although none of you possesses a soul _quite_ as squalid as mine, I regard each of you with no small measure of fondness.”

The four men mumbled their thanks, which Pan accepted with a dramatic bow.

“Thank you! I think it is fair to say that I am the most debased individual on this planet – perhaps several of them, in fact – and quite possibly the most brilliant criminal mind of this century. The plan we embark on now is easily the most diabolical ever devised by man or otherwise, and will not only take each of you to the top of every ‘Most-Wanted’ list but will also make you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams.” He clapped his hands together. “So, let the adventure begin, and here’s to the success of our finest criminal endeavour!”

“Sir?”

“What is it, Gregory?”

“All that money. I’m not so sure. I’d settle for a Gainsborough. You know, that one of the kid in the blue suit.”

Pan stared at him for a moment, a grin slowly breaking out on his boyish features. “Why not? Odious _and_ art-loving! What a perfect combination. You shall have your Gainsborough. Now, let’s – yes, Dr Jekyll?”

“You won’t forget to file my research application with Union College of Surgeons, will you?”

“Of course not.”

“Including the request for unlimited access to all experimental pharmaceuticals?”

“Yes, yes, and the white mice. Mr Jones, is there anything you would like to request?”

“What I want is right in front of me,” Jones snarled, staring at Rumplestiltskin as best he could with unfocused eyes. Rumplestiltskin, for his part, fought the urge to snort. Even past retirement age with a bum leg, he could take on Jones easily – all he had to do was trick the man into falling on his own hook.

“Boring,” remarked Pan with obvious disappointment. “What about you, Mr Smee?”

“Well,” said the man with the wits of a rat, rubbing the back of his head thoughtfully. “Can I have a bridge named after my grandmother?”

“Insufferably obtuse. I don’t think that should be too difficult. Felix7?”

“I require no payment,” said Felix7 stoically, blank eyes staring out from underneath his hoodie. “I am merely your willing servant. To serve a good and wise master is the best that can be expected of any sentient being.”

“Ha! I _love_ that man!” Pan exclaimed, jumping off the table before addressing Mendel again. “Do you understand what you have to do?”

“Perfectly.”

“Well, then; Rumple, open the portal. Godspeed, my dear friend!”

Rumplestiltskin shut his eyes before pressing the green Open button; there was a flash and a powerful electromagnetic pulse that had every compass for miles around spinning wildly. Mendel disappeared, and the portal shut behind him. Rumplestiltskin started the egg timer while Dr Jekyll read a children’s paperback copy of _Jack and the Beanstalk_ to check Mendel’s progress. Felix7 kept his gun trained on Rumplestiltskin, Jones continued to leer, and Smee looked at something sticky he had found inside his ear.

Two minutes later, there was another flash and Mendel reappeared. He was quite out of breath and sat down on a nearby chair, panting, before holding up a blood-stained tunic.

“Done,” he announced. Pan clapped again.

“Excellent. Now, it may take a few days to be sure that it worked – Felix7, you will return to Storybrooke and report back any evidence of the suspicious and entirely unfortunate death of Mr Elwood. Number 96, Andersen Street.”

“Yessir.”

“Oh, and Felix –”

“Yes, sir?”

“While you’re out, why don’t you quieten down Mr John Darling for me? He’s of no earthly use to us anymore.”

Felix7 nodded before leaving the room. Rumplestiltskin fell into a nearby chair and buried his head in his hands.


	15. Lunch With Graham

**_Warning: graphic depictions of gun violence_ **

‘Graham Humbert is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of Special Operations. They never win commendations or medals and the public will never know their names, and they are all worth ten of people like me.’

Emma Swan, _A Life in SpecOps_

I drove Graham to Granny’s Diner. The place was almost the Storybrooke hub as far as lunch was concerned; everybody ate there. If something happened in town, you could hear about it from somebody at Granny’s. The menu had been updated somewhat since the last time I was there and some minor renovations had been made, but for the most part, it was still the same diner I had been to on my first visit to Storybrooke. That day, I’d sat with my mom and my brothers in the second booth from the door. We’d had pancakes and hot cocoa with cinnamon – except for Jesse, who had a milkshake instead – served to us by the kindly, slightly frightening, older woman who doted on my brothers like her own grandchildren.

A gum-chewing waitress with gold-blonde ringlets came up to the table and pulled a notebook out of her apron. She was about fifty and looked vaguely familiar.

“Hello, Sheriff,” she said in a flat tone with only a sliver of interest in her voice. “All well?”

“Very well, thank you. Goldie, I’d like you to meet my new deputy, Emma Swan.”

Goldilocks – now I remembered her – looked at me and frowned.

“I remember you,” she said, now very interested. “You’re Snow’s daughter. Lieutenant Nolan’s sister.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said firmly, wanting to make sure nobody thought I was ashamed of the connection. “He was my brother, and he didn’t do what they said he did.”

She stared at me for a moment, as if wanting to say something but unsure of how I’d react. “What’ll you have, then?” she asked instead with forced cheerfulness. She had lost someone in the Charge; I could sense it.

“What’s the special?” asked Graham.

“Soupe d’Auverge au Fromage, followed by Rojoes Cominho.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Braised pork with cumin, coriander and lemon,” replied Graham, his accent making the words sound funny.

“Sounds great.”

“Two specials please, and a carafe of mineral water.”

Goldilocks nodded, scribbled a note and gave me a small smile before departing. After she left, Graham turned to me with interest. He would have guessed I was ex-military eventually. I wore it badly.

“Kentucky vet, eh? Did you know Colonel Phoebus was in town?”

“Yeah, I bumped into him yesterday on the way to town. He wanted me to go to one of his rallies.”

“Will you?”

I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. His idea of the perfect end to the war is to bomb the border until the country splits in half. I’m just holding out hope that the UN can bring both governments to their senses.”

“I was called up in ’08,” said Graham. “Even got past basic training. Fortunately, it was the presidential turnover year, so the Union withdrew after the election. I was never needed.”

“I remember reading somewhere that since the war started, only twelve years of the hundred and fifty-five have actually been spent fighting.”

“Something like that,” he agreed. “But they certainly make up for it when the guns start shooting.”

I looked at him. He had taken a sip of water after offering the bottle to me first.

“How long have you been in Storybrooke?”

“About five years now. I graduated from the police academy in Denver and bounced around all over. Colorado, Utah, did a brief stint in Kansas –”

“In Kansas?”

“Before they defected,” said Graham quickly. I frowned. Kansas had defected to the Confederacy in 2003, which would have made him maybe eighteen or nineteen at the time. Not completely unbelievable if he had still been a cadet, but I got the sense that there was something he wasn’t telling me.

Goldilocks reappeared, placing two bowls of soup in front of us with a basket of freshly baked bread. “Enjoy. It’s on the house.”

“But –” I began.

“Save your breath,” she said impassively. “You went back, Swan. After the shit hit the fan. You went back to do what you could even though they ordered you not to. I value that.”

She turned and left before I could protest further.

“You married?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Nah,” he replied, sipping his water. “I haven’t really had the time, although I’m not against the idea in principle. I’m a workaholic and not a great socialiser. I did get short-listed for a SpecOps posting in Ohio, so who knows? Might be the perfect time to try and meet somebody.”

“The money’s good over there and the facilities aren’t bad. I’d consider it if I was offered the opportunity,” I replied. I meant it, too.

“Really?” asked Graham with a flush of excitement that was curiously at odds with the slightly cold demeanour he had demonstrated until now.

“Sure. Change of scenery,” I clarified, just in case Graham got the wrong idea. “So, ah, what made you pick Storybrooke?”

He thought for a moment. “I’d been away from home for a long time. Started to miss my family. Plus, I had some good friends here. Jim was one of them.” He stared out of the window wistfully. “If I’d been there –”

“– then you’d both be dead,” I interjected. “Anyone who shoots a man six times in the face didn’t go to Sunday school. He would’ve killed you and not even thought about it. There’s not a whole lot to be gained from what ifs; believe me, I know. I lost a lot of friends in Kentucky. I relive it over and over again every night, but the fact is that it would probably happen exactly as it did if I could do it all over again.”

Graham smiled shyly. It was an unfortunate part of our job, but there it was.

“So what about you?” he asked after a moment. “How did you end up in Boston?”

“I got offered a job there after leaving the army,” I told him. “I – I guess I wanted some space after my brother died.”

That was true enough, even if I was leaving out most of the sordid details – like how Neal and I had ended things none too amicably, how Jesse had accused me of walking out on our mom when she needed us. It had been ugly, and reparations had been ten years in the making; I didn’t like to talk about it much.

“That wouldn’t have anything to do with the feller I saw you talking to last night?” asked Graham, almost as if he had read my mind. I gave him a look; he shrugged in return. “I’m a cop. You know what we’re like.”

“Nosy.” I chuckled. “Yeah. He’s got a lot to do with it.”

“Not something you like to talk about?”

“Not really.”

Graham nodded understandingly. He finished off a bread roll and then stood. “You done?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Come on; we’re going to Elm Street.”

 

“So who is this guy we’re going to see?”

“Feller named John Darling,” Graham replied as I pulled my car into the kerb. We found ourselves opposite a small apartment complex that had a gentle glow of light showing through the windows. “A few years back, Crommetty and I had the extremely good fortune to arrest several members of a gang which had been attempting to peddle a rather poorly forged sequel to the _Ballad of Mulan_ titled _Mulan II: The Huns Return._ Nobody was fooled. Darling avoided jail time by turning state’s evidence. Cassandra’s got some dirt on him regarding a recent _Cardenio_ scam; I don’t want to use it, but I will if I have to.”

“What makes you think he has anything to do with Crommetty’s death?” I asked as we let ourselves in the building.

“Nothing,” said Graham simply. “He’s just next on the list.”

The complex’s fluorescent lights flickered as we climbed the stairs. Graham stopped outside a door on the second floor, raised a hand to knock and then changed his mind. He opened it noiselessly and we crept in.

John Darling was a feeble-looking character who had spent too many years in institutions to be able to look after himself properly. Without designated bathtimes he forgot to wash, and without fixed mealtimes he went hungry. He wore thick glasses and mismatched clothes splattered with plaster, and he had a number of poorly healed scars crisscrossing his arms and face. He made most of his living by casting busts of famous writers in plaster of Paris, but he had too much bad history to stay on the straight and narrow. Other criminals blackmailed him into helping them and Darling, not the strongest of men to begin with, could do little to resist. Really, I wasn’t at all surprised that of his forty-one years, only twenty had been spent at liberty.

Inside his apartment we came across a large workbench on which were placed about five hundred foot-high busts of Will Shakespeare, all of them in varying stages of completion. A large vat of plaster of Paris lay empty next to a rack containing twenty rubber casts; it seemed Darling had a big order on.

The man himself was at the back of his workshop indulging in his second profession, repairing Will-Speak machines. He was working on a short-circuited Othello when we came up behind him.

The mannequin’s crude voice-box crackled as Darling made some trifling adjustments.

 _“It is the cause, it is the cause_ (click) _yet I’ll not shed a drop of her blood_ (click) _nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow …”_

“Hello, John,” said Graham.

Darling jumped and shorted out the Othello’s controls. The dummy opened its eyes wide and gave out a terrified cry of _“MONUMENTAL ALABASTER”_ before falling limp. Darling glared at Graham.

“Creeping around at night, Sheriff Humbert?” said Darling in a soft English accent. (It occurred to me later how many people in Storybrooke have foreign accents). “Hardly your style, is it?”

Graham smiled. “I thought I’d try a different approach. John, this is my new deputy, Emma Swan.”

Darling eyed me suspiciously. Graham continued:

“You heard about Jim Crommetty, didn’t you?”

“I heard,” replied Darling.

“I wondered if you had any information you might want to impart?”

“Me?”

“Regarding Crommetty’s murder,” I added, making Darling jump visibly when I spoke.

“I know nothing,” he recited in an unconvincing manner.

“Listen, John,” said Graham, who had picked up on Darling’s nervousness. “I’d be really, really sorry if Officer Cole had to pull you in for questioning about that _Cardenio_ scam.”

Darling’s lower lip trembled and his eyes darted between the two of us nervously. “I don’t know anything, Sheriff,” he whined. “Besides, you don’t know what he’d do.”

“ _Who_ would do _what_ , John?”

That was when I heard it. A slight _click_ behind us. I pushed Graham out of the way; he tripped and collapsed on top of Darling, who gave a small cry that was drowned out by the loud concussion of a shotgun going off at close quarters. We were lucky; the blast hit the wall, a hole the size of a grapefruit opening up exactly at my chest height. I told Graham to stay down and dashed low behind the workbench, trying to put some distance between myself and our assailant. When I reached the other side of the room I looked up and saw a man dressed in a hooded black raincoat holding a pump-action shotgun. He spotted me and I ducked as another blast from the gun scattered plaster fragments of Shakespeare all over me. The shot’s concussion wave had started up a mannequin of Romeo, who intoned pleadingly, “ _He jests at scars, that never felt a wound. But soft! What light through yonder …_ ” until a third shot silenced him. I glanced across at Graham, who shook the plaster out of his hair and drew his pistol. I ran to the kitchen, ducking as our assailant fired again, shattering more of Darling’s carefully painted plaster busts. I heard Graham’s semi-automatic crack twice. I stood behind the refrigerator and fired as well, but that did nothing except splinter the wood on the door frame as the shooter had taken refuge in Darling’s bedroom. Graham fired again and his shot ricocheted off a Will-Speak machine of Lord and Lady Macbeth; they started whispering to each other about the wisdom of murdering the King. I caught a glimpse of the man running across the room to outflank us. I would have had a clear shot when he stopped, but John Darling stood in the way, blocking me. Idiot.

“Felix7!” cried Darling desperately. “Please help me! Dr Jekyll said –”

Darling, sadly, had mistaken Felix7’s intentions but had little time to regret them as our assailant swiftly dispatched him from close range, then turned to make his escape. Graham and I must have opened fire at once; Felix7 managed three paces before stumbling and falling heavily against some packing crates.

“Graham!” I shouted. “You okay?”

He answered slightly unsteadily but in the affirmative, so I advanced on the fallen figure, who was breathing in short gasps. His face was disturbingly calm as I kicked the shotgun away from him and then ran a hand down his coat while holding my gun a few inches from his face. I found an automatic in a shoulder holster and a Walther PPK in an inside pocket. There was a twelve-inch knife and a baby Derringer in two of his other pockets. Graham appeared beside me.

“Darling?” I asked.

“Finished.”

“He knew this clown. He called him Felix7, and something about a doctor named Jekyll, too.”

Felix7 simply smiled at me while I took out his wallet. Graham, face red with rage, grabbed him by the lapels.

“James Crommetty!” he demanded, shaking the man violently despite my protests. “Did you kill him?”

“I killed a lot of people,” said Felix7. “I don’t remember their names.”

“You shot him six times in the face!”

Recognition dawned on the dying killer. “ _That_ I remember.”

“Six times! Why?!”

Felix7 gave a small shrug. “Six was all I had.”

Graham punched him in the face and then took his gun out, pulling the trigger before I could stop him. It was lucky for Graham that the hammer fell harmlessly on the back of a spent cartridge. He chucked the useless gun away and hauled Felix7 up by the lapels.

“WHO ARE YOU?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Felix7 placidly, still bleeding out despite my best efforts to plug his wounds. “I was married, I think, and owned a blue car. There was an apple tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up and I think I had a brother named Tom. The memories are too vague and indistinct to concern me. I fear nothing because I value nothing. Darling is dead. My job is done. Anything else is of little consequence.”

He managed a wan smile, then turned dark eyes on me.

“Pan was right, Miss Swan,” he murmured, a bubble of red blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. “You are a worthy adversary.”

“Pan?” I repeated. “Where is he?!”

He chuckled and then coughed up more blood, shaking his head slowly. My efforts to stop the bleeding were no good; his breathing just became more and more laboured until it stopped altogether.

“ _Shit!_ ”

“That’s language unbecoming an officer, Swan!” said a voice behind us. Graham and I turned together to see my second-least favourite person and two of his minders. He didn’t look in a terribly good mood. On a hunch, I nudged Felix7’s wallet under a workbench with my foot and then stood up.

“Move to the side,” Spencer demanded.

We did as we were told. One of Spencer’s men reached down and felt for Felix7’s pulse. He looked up at Spencer and shook his head.

“Any ID?”

The minder started to search him.

“You’ve really managed to screw things up this time, Swan,” said Spencer with barely concealed fury. “The only lead I’ve had for weeks is now flatline. When I’m through with you, you’ll be lucky to get a job setting cones on the E90.”

I put two and two together.

“You _knew_ we were in here, didn’t you?”

Spencer didn’t answer me; but then, he didn’t have to.

“That man could have taken us straight to his boss,” the QuangTech man asserted.

“Pan?”

“Pan is dead, Miss Swan.”

“Bullshit. You know as well as I do that he’s alive and you want something from him. What is it?”

“Take care you don’t forget who you speak to in that tone.”

“I’m talking to someone whose ambition has throttled his morality.”

“Wrong. You’re talking to QuangTech, a company that has the welfare of the Union States foremost in its heart; everything that you see around you, including your precious Storybrooke, has been given to this country by the benevolence of the Quangle-Wangle. Do you really believe we don’t deserve a small amount of gratitude in return?”

“If QuangTech was as selfless as you suggest, Mr Spencer, then they should expect _nothing_ in return.”

“Fine words, Miss Swan, but cash is always the deciding factor no matter what the circumstances; if corporations weren’t motivated by commerce or greed, nothing would ever get done.”

I could hear sirens approaching. Spencer gave me one final glare before making an exit, his minions close behind, leaving Graham and me with Felix7 and Darling’s bodies. Graham was staring at Felix7’s lifeless form.

“I’m glad that he’s dead and I’m glad that it was me who pulled the trigger,” he said simply, as though describing an experience as common as seeing the Statue of Liberty. “Does that sound wrong?”

“No,” I replied. “He killed your friend and would have kept killing until someone stopped him. Don’t even think about it.”

I reached down and retrieved Felix7’s wallet, mercifully undiscovered by Spencer. It contained everything that one would expect to find – banknotes, stamps, receipts and credit cards – but they were all just plain white paper. The credit cards were white plastic with a row of zeroes where the numbers usually were.

“Pan has a sense of humour.”

“Look at this,” said Graham, holding up one of Felix7’s hands for me to look at. “His fingertips have been wiped clean by acid. And see here, this scar running down behind the scalp line.”

“Somebody replaced his _face?_ ” I exclaimed. Okay, that made me feel sick.

There was a screech of tyres from downstairs. Graham and I put down our weapons and held our badges in the air in case there were any misunderstandings, but thankfully it was Roland who arrived on the scene first.

“Dead?” he asked professionally, walking over to examine the two bodies.

“That one by him, and that one by us,” I admitted, pointing to Darling and Felix7 in turn. Robin appeared, limping along soundly. He was followed by Cassandra, who took one look at the scene and went pale.

“What the hell happened?” she said, holstering her gun. “When I left, Weselton was screaming down the telephone line and it takes a lot to drag him away from his golf club AGM. He wants a full report on his desk no later than tomorrow morning.”

“It was Pan,” I said, which got me strange looks from Roland and Cassie. “George Spencer was here with the intention of following one of Pan’s hitmen after he’d dispatched the both of us.”

The two of them looked at each other, and then at Graham. I thought Robin was going to comment further but then a call came over his walkie for an office in need of assistance. It was Ruby. I grabbed my radio and switched it on, but Graham grabbed me by the wrist with a surprising turn of speed. He looked grim, and not just because he’d just shot a man.

“Don’t do it, Emma. Not with Ruby.”

“But an officer in need of assistance –”

“Don’t get involved. Ruby is on her own and it’s best to keep it that way.”

I looked at Robin, who nodded and said: “Ruby knows what she’s doing. I hear calls like that from her all the time but she’s always at Granny’s the next morning, regular as clockwork. She’ll be fine.”

The radio was silent; the channel was an open one and every single officer in the Storybrooke region would have heard it, but nobody answered. Ruby’s voice came over the airwaves again: “For God’s sakes, guys, I’m serious this time –!”

Graham moved to snatch the radio off me but I dodged him and headed for the door.

“Ruby, this is Emma. Where are you?”

Robin shook his head sadly as I pushed past him. “It was nice knowing you, Emma.”

I ignored him and ploughed my way downstairs.

“Hell of a woman,” Robin murmured sadly at my retreating back.

“We’re going to be married,” replied Graham matter-of-factly.

Cassandra frowned and looked at him. “Really? When’s the happy day?”

“Oh, I’ve no idea,” said Graham with a sigh. “She’s everything I ever wanted in a woman. Brave and resourceful; intelligent and loyal.”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow, perhaps feeling a little judged. Robin looked at them both and asked: “So when are you going to ask her?”

“Dunno,” said Graham. “If Ruby’s in the sort of trouble that I think she is, then probably never.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for all the support guys, this has been fantastic! Always love to hear what you think! Please, if you like this story check out some of my other works - I'm in the process of rewriting seasons 3b-5 in 'There But for the Grace of God' and 'Be All My Sins Remember'd' (two parts of three)!


	16. SO-17; Suckers & Biters

‘… I made the assistance calls as a matter of course, had done since Woodley got pulled into the shadows. I never really expected anyone to answer; it was more just my way of saying, “Ho, guys! I’m still out here!” Nope, never once expected it. Never expected it at all …”

Ruby ‘Red’ Lucas, interview in _Van Helsing’s Gazette_

 

“Ruby, where are you?”

There was a pause, and then my aunt’s voice came over the radio: ‘Emma, think hard before you do this –”

“I have, Aunt. Where are you?”

She told me, and fifteen minutes later I pulled up outside the Sisters of St Meissa Convent. There were lights on in the dormitory but the chapel was completely darkened.

“Alright, Ruby, I’m here. What do you need?”

Her voice came back on the wireless, but this time slightly strained. “I’m in Mother Superior’s office. Hurry, please – my cloak’s on the passenger seat –”

There was a yell and she stopped transmitting.

I ran to Ruby’s car, parked in the dark entrance of the old chapel. The moon passed behind a cloud and darkness descended; I felt an oppressive hand fall across my heart. It wasn’t quite the full moon yet – that wasn’t for another week, but I remembered Mom telling me that Ruby’s symptoms sometimes appeared early. Thankfully, her car was unlocked; I grabbed her cloak and ran up the front steps of the chapel, the interior gloomily lit by emergency lighting. I flicked a panel of switches but the power was stubbornly out. In the meagre light, I narrowly avoided stubbing my toe on a pew and made my way to Mother Superior’s office from memory. As I ran down the aisle I became aware of a strong odour; it matched the sullen smell of death I picked up in the trunk of Ruby’s car when she picked me up from the mechanic’s. I stopped, skidded on the polished wood floor, the nape of my neck twitching as a gust of cold wind caught me. Then I turned around and froze as the figure of a man silhouetted against the dim glow of an exit light appeared in front of me.

“Hello?” I murmured, my throat dry and my voice cracking.

“Hello,” said the figure jovially, walking softly forwards and shining a flashlight at me. “The name’s Frampton; I’m the groundsman. What are you doing here?”

“I'm Officer Emma Swan. There’s an officer in need of assistance in Mother Superior’s office.”

“Really?” asked the groundsman. “Must’ve followed some kids in. Well, you’d better come with me.”

I studied him carefully; a glint from one of the exit lights caught the metallic gold of a crucifix around his throat. I breathed a sigh of relief before following him out of the chapel.

“This place is so old it’s embarrassing,” muttered Frampton, leading me down a second corridor off the first. “Who did you say you were looking for?”

“Ruby Lucas.”

“What does she do?”

“She hunts vampires.”

“Really? We haven’t had an infestation in over twenty years. A junior nun went with a school trip out to the woods and came back a changed woman. Ah, here we are.”

He shone the flashlight over the gold print on Mother Superior’s office door and pushed it open, and we entered the large room. Frampton’s light flicked across the off-white walls but a quick search revealed nothing of Ruby.

“Are you sure she said Mother Superior’s office?”

“Certain. She –”

There was a sound of breaking glass and a muffled curse somewhere in the room.

“What was that?”

“Probably rats,” said Frampton.

“And the swearing?”

“ _Uncultured_ rats. Come on, let’s –”

But I had moved off to a doorway behind Mother Superior’s oak desk, taking Frampton’s flashlight with me. It was a closet, which I opened wide and then shrank back as the smell of blood hit me. Inside, scrabbling on the floor amongst a mess of torn Bibles and a broken crucifix, was Ruby, her self-control having apparently abandoned her. She’d caught a mouse, and I preferred not to think of what she’d done to the poor little pest.

“What are you doing?” I asked, revulsion rising in my throat.

She turned to me, eyes glowing unnatural golden and mouse blood staining the corner of her mouth.

“I was hungry!” she howled. “And I couldn’t find – I couldn’t find –”

She shut her eyes, gathered her thoughts with a Herculean effort, then stammered: “My cloak!”

I forced down a foul gagging sensation and threw the red cloak over Ruby, who had collapsed in a heap and was sobbing quietly. I knew from past experience it would take a couple of moments before she was back to her normal self, so I sat with her and prepared to wait. Then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I whirled around. It was Frampton, and he had an unpleasant smile on his lips.

“Let her carry on. She’s happier this way, believe me.”

I pushed his hand off my shoulder and for an instant my bare skin touched his. It was icy cold and I felt a shiver run through me. I backed away hastily, tripped over Mother Superior’s chair and fell to the ground, temporarily dazed. Frampton leered at me. I drew my gun and pointed it at him, as he glided towards me without walking. I didn’t shout a warning; I just pulled the trigger and a bright flash illuminated the office. Frampton flew across the room and into a blackboard detailing the nuns’ schedules while I scrabbled back to Ruby, who was groaning.

“Ruby? Say something!”

“That _really_ hurt.”

But it wasn’t Ruby talking. It was Frampton. He had picked himself up from the floor and was tying what looked like a lobster bib around his neck.

“Time for dinner, Officer Swan. I won’t trouble you with the menu because … well, _you’re it_!”

The door of the office slammed shut and I looked at my gun; it was going to do me about as much good as a water pistol.

I got up and backed away from Frampton, who once more appeared to glide towards me. I fired again but he was ready for it; he simple winced and didn’t even hesitate.

“But the crucifix –!” I shouted, trapped against a wall. “And this is a church!”

“Little fool!” replied Frampton. “Do you really think that Christianity has a monopoly on people like me?”

I searched desperately for some kind of weapon, but apart from the chair – which flew out of my reach as soon as I touched it – there was nothing.

“ _Thoon_ be over.” Frampton grinned. He had sprouted an inordinately long single front door which grew over his bottom lip and gave him a lisp. “Thoon you will be joining Lucath for a little thnack. _After_ I have finithed!”

He smiled and opened his mouth wider, impossibly so – it seemed almost to fill the room. Then, as suddenly as he’d begun, Frampton stopped, looked confused and rolled his eyes up into the sockets. He turned grey, then black, then seemed to slough away like burned pages in a book. There was a musty smell of decay that almost blotted out the reek of mouse blood, and soon there was nothing except Ruby, who had her hood pulled up over her head and was still holding the sharpened stake that had so quickly destroyed the former abomination.

“You okay?” he asked with a triumphant grin.

“Yeah,” I replied shakily. “Yeah, I’m okay. Well, now, anyway.”

Ruby dropped the stake and drew me up a chair as the lights flickered back on.

“Thanks for that,” I murmured. “I guess I owe you one.”

“No way, Emma. _I_ owe _you._ No-one’s ever answered a call of mine before. The symptoms came on as I was sniffing out Fang here. Stupid me, left my cloak in the car …”

She trailed off as she looked forlornly at the torn Bibles and mouse blood stains.

“They’re not gonna believe this report,” I said.

“They don’t even _read_ my reports, Emma. The last person who did is still in therapy. So they just file ’em and forget about ’em. I don’t even tell Dorothy half of what I get up to on the job.”

I hugged her on instinct. It seemed like the right thing to do, and she returned it gratefully.

“So what about Frampton?” I asked once I’d let her go. We left the office, Ruby leaving an apology note for Mother Superior on her desk.

“He was good,” Ruby admitted. “ _Real_ good. He didn’t feed on his own turf and was never greedy; just enough to sate his thirst.”

“So how’d you get on to him?” I asked once we were back in the chapel.

“Luck. He was behind me in his car at the lights. Looked in the mirror – empty car. Followed him here and _pow;_ I knew he was a sucker as soon as he spoke. I would’ve got to him sooner, if not for my own trouble.”

At her car, she stopped, took out her automatic and pulled the slide back, ejecting a single shiny bullet.

“Silver,” she explained as she gave it to me. “I never use anything else. Take it for luck; there’s weird shit about.”

“I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing as luck.”

“My point exactly. Gods keep you, Emma, and thanks again.”

I pocketed the silver bullet and started to say something but she was gone already, rummaging in the boot of her car for a vacuum cleaner and a bin-liner. For her, the night was far from over.


	17. Neal Again

‘I didn’t really know how I felt when Emma came back to Storybrooke. A part of me imagined that it was inevitable – Pop calls it fairy tale intuition. Sometimes you just know how things are going to play out before they do. I’d heard about Emma’s problems in Boston and I know better than most how she responds to stress. Anyone who came back from Kentucky were to become experts on the subject whether we liked it or not …’

Neal Cassidy, _Memoirs of a Kentucky Veteran_

 

“I told Mr Cassidy that you had haemorrhagic fever but he didn’t believe me,” said Liz when I got back to Granny’s.

“The flu would have been more believeable.”

Liz just shrugged. “He sent you this.”

She passed across an envelope. I was tempted to throw it in the bin, but I felt a little guilty about giving him such a hard time last night. The envelope contained a numbered ticket for _Richard III_ which played every Friday evening at the high school multipurpose centre. Leo was the one who’d introduced us to it. We used to attend every week with my mom and brothers and Neal’s siblings whenever they flew over from Scotland. It was a good show, run by the school’s drama club, and the audience made it even better.

“When did you go out with him last?” asked Liz, perhaps sensing my indecision.

“Ten years ago,” I replied without looking up.

“ _Ten years?_ Oh, my God, darling, _go._ Most of my ex-boyfriends wouldn’t even remember my face after that long.”

I looked at the ticket again. The show began in an hour.

“Is this why you left Storybrooke?” asked Liz, obviously keen to be of some help. I nodded. Almost everybody in town knew that was why I’d left. “And you kept a photo of him all this time?”

I didn’t answer, but she shook her head anyway.

“He said he’d pick you up unless I called to tell him otherwise. You go and change.”

She obviously wouldn’t be told otherwise, so I trotted up to my room, had a quick shower and then tried on virtually everything in my meagre wardrobe. I put my hair up, and then down again, then up once more, muttered “too boyish” at a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and slipped into a red dress. I instantly decided it was too ostentatious and settled on a light blue one instead. Then I found a pair of earrings that Mom gave me for Christmas and locked my automatic in the room safe. Thankfully Liz called me down before I could second-guess myself for the tenth time and, with a deep breath, I met Neal out the front of the diner.

“Wow,” he said, turning red as soon as he realised what he’d said. “Uh, sorry. You, uh, you look beautiful.”

“Thanks,” I replied, grinning at his embarrassment as I kissed him on the cheek and took a deep breath of his aftershave. He hadn’t changed a single bit in ten years.

“How was your first day?”

“Oh, you know. Werewolves, vampires, shot a suspect dead, lost a witness to a gunman, QuangTech tried to have me killed, puncture on the car. The usual crap.”

“A puncture? Really?”

“No, I just made that up. Listen, I’m sorry about yesterday. I think I’m taking my work a bit too seriously.”

“If you weren’t, that’s when I’d really start worrying,” said Neal with an understanding smile. “Come on, curtain-up time’s in ten minutes.”

He opened the car door for me in a familiar gesture that I disliked from anybody but him, and we drove to the school in comfortable silence. The hall was exactly as I remembered it; the gold-painted plaster mouldings around the stage in the same state of disrepair that they had ever been, the same rickety chairs lined up in twenty rows of forty with an extra hundred chairs stacked at the back in case of last-minute bookings. Since Storybrooke lacked a cinema – something that the council had been bugging Mayor Midas Cole about for fifteen years – the theatre was considered _the_ social event for people who didn’t like the Rabbit Hole nightclub, or the selection of vaguely English and German pubs scattered around town. The school drama club ran it under direction from the former Queen Titania (and increasingly from Grace Blau née Hatter), but that still comprised only a tiny company – just a backstage crew, two sound technicians, a prompter and three or four young, but sometimes surprisingly talented, actors. The rest of the cast got pulled from an audience who had been to the play so many times before that they knew it back-to-front. Casting was usually done half an hour before curtain-up, if that.

Occasionally, seasoned actors and actresses would make guest appearances, although never by advanced booking. Most of the time, they were actually working in Boston or New York and had decided to make a random trip to the odd little Maine town filled with real-life fairytale characters. Titania, if she could get hold of them before they left, would rope them into an impromptu treat for the audience and cast. Jesse told me that, a couple of years ago, a local King Richard had found himself playing opposite British actress Lola Vavoom, who had only dropped into Storybrooke to ask directions after getting lost on her way to Montreal. It had been something of a treat for him; he hadn’t needed to buy dinner for a month.

Neal offered me his arm in another familiar gesture as we walked into the hall. The theatregoers were chatting noisily, the brightly coloured costumes of the unchosen actors in the audience giving a gala flavour to the occasion. I felt the electricity in the air and realised how much I had missed it. We found our seats.

“When was the last time you were here?” I asked once we were comfortable.

“With you,” replied Neal, standing up and applauding wildly as the curtain opened to a wheezing alarum. I did the same.

At that point, the elderly Robin Goodfellow, still as cheeky as he had ever been but with whiter hair, swept onto the stage in a black cloak with red lining.

“Welcome, welcome, all you Will-loving R3 fans, to the Storybrooke High School Theatre, where tonight (drum roll), for your DELECTATION, for your GRATIFICATION, for your EDIFICATION, for your JOLIFICATION, for your SHAKESPEARIFICATION, we will perform Will’s beloved _Richard III,_ for the audience, to the audience, BY THE AUDIENCE!”

The crowd cheered, and Robin held up his hands to quieten them. No matter how many times you watched the show, Puck somehow managed to make it feel like the first time.

“But, before we start, let’s give a big hand to Philip and Aurora Solberg, who are attending for their two-hundredth time!”

The crowd applauded enthusiastically as Phil and Aurora walked on, dressed as Richard and Lady Anne. They bowed and curtsied to the audience, and someone in the front row threw a bouquet of briars onstage.

“Philip has played Dick the shit twenty-seven times and Creepy Clarence twelve times; Aurora has been Lady Anne thirty-one times and Margaret eight times. So to commemorate their bicentennial, they will be playing opposite each other for the first time!”

They respectively bowed and curtsied once more as the audience applauded and the curtains closed, jammed, opened slightly and closed again. There was a moment’s pause and then the curtains reopened, revealing Richard at the side of the stage. He limped up and down the boards, eyeing the audience malevolently past a particularly ugly prosthetic nose.

“Ham!” yelled someone at the back.

Richard opened his mouth to speak and the whole audience erupted in unison: “ _When_ is the winter of our discontent?”

“ _Now,_ ” replied Richard with a cruel smile – at which I had to laugh, because I knew how gentle a guy Philip really was – “ _is the winter of our discontent …!_ ”

A cheer went up to the high vaulted ceiling. The play had begun. Neal and I cheered with them. _Richard III_ was one of those plays that could repeal the law of diminishing returns; it could be enjoyed over and over again and never once got boring.

“ _… made glorious summer by this son of York,_ ” continued Richard, limping to the side of the stage. On the word ‘summer’, two hundred people put sunglasses on and looked up at an imaginary sun.

“ _… and all the clouds that lower’d upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean, buried …_ ”

“ _When_ were our brows burned?” yelled the audience.

“ _Now are our brows burned with victorious wreaths,_ ” Richard carried on, ignoring them completely. We must have been to this show thirty times and even now, ten years later, I found myself mouthing the words with the actor on the stage.

“ _… to the lascivious pleasing of a lute …_ ”

“Piano!” somebody shouted as an alternative to a lute, and someone else yelled out, “Bagpipes!” A third person at the back mistimed the cue and shouted in a high voice, “Euphonium!” halfway through the next line and was drowned out by the audience yelling: “Pick a card!” as Richard told them that he “ _was not shaped for sportive tricks …_ ”

Neal looked across at me and smiled. I returned it instinctively; I was enjoying myself immensely.

“ _I that am rudely stamp’d …_ ” muttered Richard. The audience took its cue and stamped the ground with a crash that reverberated around the auditorium.

Neal and I had never wanted to tread the boards ourselves and had never bothered to dress up. The production went on every Friday night; with the exception of the yearly play put on by the school (cast teenagers and children only), the stage was empty the rest of the year. Keen amateur thespians and Shakespeare fans would drive from all over the north-east to participate, and it was never anything but a full house. A few years back, a Mexican troupe performed the play in Spanish to rapturous applause; the school took a group to Guadalajara a few months later to reciprocate.

“ _… and that so lamely and unfashionable, that dogs bark at me …_ ”

The audience barked loudly, making a noise like feeding time at the animal shelter. Outside, several cats new to the vicinity ducked behind the bins, while the more seasoned moggies looked at each other with a knowing grin.

The play went on, the actors doing sterling work and the audience parrying with quips that ranged from intelligent to obscure to downright vulgar. When Clarence explained that the king was convinced that, “ _… by the letter ‘G’ his issue disinherited shall be …_ ” the audience yelled out:

“Gloucester begins with a ‘G’, dummy!”

And when Lady Anne had Richard on his knees in front of her with his sword at his throat, the audience was torn between those encouraging her to run him through and those laughing at the absurdity of watching Sleeping Beauty holding a blade on her Prince Charming. And just before one of Richard’s nephews, the young Duke of York played by twelve-year-old Robbie Blau, alluded to Richard’s hump, they screamed, “Don’t mention the hump, kid!”. And after he did, “The Tower! The Tower!”

The play was the Garrick cut and lasted about two and a half hours. At Bosworth Field most of the audience got up on stage to help re-enact the battle. Richard, Catesby and Richmond had to finish the show in the aisle as the battle raged about them. A pink pantomime horse appeared on cue when Richard offered to swap his kingdom for just such a beast, and the battle finally ended in the foyer. Richmond then took one of the girls from the popcorn stall as his Elizabeth and continued his final speech, swinging a cup of popcorn from atop a stack of chairs while the audience hailed him as the new King of England and the soldiers who had fought on Richard’s side proclaimed their new allegiance. The play ended with Richmond declaring, “ _God say Amen!_ ”

“Amen!” said the crowd amind jovial applause. It had been a good show. The crew did a fine job and this time nobody had been seriously injured during the Battle of Bosworth. Neal and I filed out quickly and found a table in the café across the road. Neal ordered us two coffees and we looked at one another.

“You’re looking good, Emma. You’ve aged a lot better than me.”

“Yeah, right. Look at these lines –”

“Laughter lines.”

“Nothing is that funny.”

“Are you here for good?” he asked suddenly.

“I don’t know,” I answered, dropping my gaze. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving, but –

“It depends.”

“On?”

I looked at him and shrugged. “On SpecOps.” Then the coffee arrived and I smiled brightly. “So, when did you come back from New York?”

“A couple of months ago. I got sick of the big city.”

I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No, really,” he said, and I knew he was honest. “Don’t get me wrong, the job was great, but I missed Mom and Pop. They came down to visit in August – hang on, I think I’ve got a picture somewhere –”

He flicked through his phone until he found the right photo. It showed Neal and his family at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sitting in front of one of the pairs of giant Greek columns outside the front door.

“Oh, my God, is that Nicholas?” I asked, looking at Neal’s youngest brother goofing off by pretending to knock over one of the columns.

“Yep. He got pretty tall too,” said Neal with a sigh. He’d never quite got over the fact that Gideon stretched to six foot while having two parents who, together, couldn’t reach a light bulb without a ladder. “Not quite as tall as Gid, thank God. But somehow he still got half an inch on me. The little shit.”

“Aww, you poor thing.”

Neal made a face and sipped his coffee. I decided to broach a more dangerous topic of conversation.

“So, how have you been?”

“Okay.” He sipped his coffee and added in a lower tone, “I got a bit lonely in New York. That’s another reason I moved back. I’m not getting any younger. How have you been?”

I wanted to tell him that I’d been lonely as well, but some things can’t be easily said. I wanted him to know that I was still angry about what he’d done. Forgive and forget was all well and good, but nobody was going to forgive and forget my brother. Leo’s dead name was mud and that was solely down to Neal.

“I’m okay.” I thought about it. “Actually, no. I haven’t.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m having a really crap time right now. I lost a colleague in Boston. I’m chasing after a lunatic that most people think is dead. QuangTech is breathing down my neck and the Regional Commander at SpecOps might just have my badge. So, yeah, things are just peachy.”

“Small beer compared to Kentucky, Emma. You’re stronger than this crap.”

Neal stirred three sugars into his coffee and I looked at him again. “Is that why you asked me out tonight, because you’re hoping we’ll get back together?”

He froze, taken aback by the directness of my question. Then he shrugged. “I’m not so sure that we were ever really apart.”

I decided not to answer that.

“I can’t apologise anymore, Emma. You lost a brother; a lost a good friend, my whole platoon and a leg. I know what Leo means to you but I saw him pointing up the wrong valley to Major Frobisher just before the armoured column moved off. I was a crazy day and crazy circumstances, but it happened and I had to say what I saw –”

I hardened my jaw and looked him squarely in the eye.

“You know, before going to Kentucky, I thought that death was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. I realised pretty damn quickly that was just for starters. Okay, Leo died; I can accept that. People get killed in a war, that’s what wars do. Good people die. Okay, so it was a military debacle of massive proportions – those happen from time to time too!”

“Emma, I had to tell them what I saw! It was the truth!”

I rounded on him angrily. “Who’s to say what the truth was? The truth is whatever we’re most comfortable with! Whatever really happened that day, the truth is now what everyone reads in the history book. It’s what _you_ told the military inquiry! Leo may have made a mistake, but he wasn’t the only one.”

“I saw him point down the wrong valley, Emma!”

“He would never have made that mistake!”

I felt an anger I hadn’t felt in ten years. Leo had been blamed for the disaster; it was as simple as that. The military leaders did what they did best and fobbed off their responsibilities onto a young lieutenant fresh out of the academy and on his first-ever posting, so my brother’s name entered the national memory as the man who lost the Light Armoured Brigade. The commanding officer and Leo had both died in the charge. It had been up to Neal, just a sergeant, to tell the story.

I got up.

“Emma, Leo _fucked_ up, okay?!” Neal cried after me desperately, making me stop in my tracks. If I’d been thinking clearer, I would have been grateful that the café was near empty. “He was just a kid. They put him in a position he wasn’t ready for and he fucked up, okay? That’s the truth of it.”

I stared at him. He stared back.

“Can we _ever_ get over this, Emma? I need to know. Urgently.”

“Urgently? You need to know _urgently_? Alright, _no,_ ” I replied coldly. “No, we can’t, and I’m sorry to have wasted your fucking precious time!”

I would have run straight out of the café then and there if my phone hadn’t rung, cutting straight through our argument. Neal watched me as I answered it, Graham’s number flashing on the screen.

“Hey, Graham,” I said, careful to keep my voice level. I really didn’t need my boss asking me why I was crying on the phone. “Uh-huh,” I repeated over and over as he relayed warbled information. In all honesty, I wasn’t really paying attention until he mentioned the names Robert and Belle Gold. “Wait, _what?_ ”

“What?” Neal asked. I stared at him in surprise; I’d forgotten he was there. “Emma, what’s going on?”

I shut off the phone and grabbed his arm. “Come with me. It’s your parents. They’re missing.”


	18. The Beauty, the Beast and the Pied Piper

‘… The finest criminal mind requires the finest accomplices to accompany him. Otherwise, what’s the point? I always found that I could never apply my most deranged plans without someone to share and appreciate them. I’m like that. Very _generous_ …’

Malcolm ‘Peter Pan’ Gold, _Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit_

 

I hadn’t seen the old pink manor since I left Storybrooke all those years ago. The only differences was the squad car parked outside and Inspector Basil Rathbone taking a statement from a woman walking a Dalmatian. A small crowd of neighbours had assembled to peer over the fence. Neal jumped out of his car and raced to the door. Basil stopped him.

“Sorry, sir, can’t let you in. Police only.”

“ _Goddamn it, they’re my parents!_ ”

I showed my badge before Neal did something stupid, like clock a police officer, and Basil reluctantly let us through to the garage.

“What’s going on?” I asked Cassandra once I found her inside, taking photographs of the forced garage doors. “Was something stolen?”

“Who the hell would know?” she said, casting an arm around at the mess. Another thing that hadn’t changed. It was exactly like I remembered; the weird collection of oddities that Rumple was so fond of, pulled to pieces by Gabrielle, the stacks of books that Belle left everywhere and dozens of photographs all over the place. I picked up one that caught my eye. It was recent; it showed the four siblings in New York, outside the New York Public Library. Neal was standing on the stairs with his arm around Gabi, Gideon perched on the pedestal and Nicholas, wearing a goofy grin, sat astrid the lion statue.

They hadn’t changed a bit.

Then Cassandra caught sight of my appearance and raised an eyebrow. “Interrupting something?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Where’s Graham?”

“On his way.”

While I spoke to Cassandra, Neal had rushed over to the other person in the garage. I jumped when I realised it was Gabi. Ten years older and no longer the scruffy eighteen-year-old with lopsided glasses and untied shoelaces that I remembered, but a scruffy adult with lopsided glasses. At least she’d remembered to tie her shoes.

“Hey,” said Neal, hugging his sister. “What the hell happened?”

“Still trying to figure that out,” said Gabi. I walked over to them; from the looks of things, she was attempting to hack somebody’s old desktop computer.

“Alright,” announced Nicholas, snapping a flip-phone shut as he joined us in the garage. He had grown a whole two feet from the dorky eleven-year-old I remembered meeting for the first time fifteen years ago, but his t-shirt suggested that his _Doctor Who_ obsession was still going strong. “Gideon’s ramped at the hospital with Mrs Hubbard –”

“Another dog bite?” asked Gabi.

“No, she slipped and hit her head on the sink. Anyway, he said he’d get here soon as he could and –”

He stopped and did a double take. He’d just realised I was there.

“Hullo, Emma.”

“Hey, Nick,” I said. “So what happened?”

He looked me up and down, taking in my attire, then at Neal, who gave him a very firm _Don’t ask_ glare.

“Uh, I don’t really know,” Nicholas said slowly, running a hand through his tousled auburn hair. “Today was Dad’s day off, so it was just us in the shop. We came ‘round for dinner at half-seven and found the garage door busted open.”

“They were already gone?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Anything missing?”

Gabi pointed. “On that table. Mum and Dad were working on some sort of project. I’m just going to get into Dad’s computer; might give us a clue as to what they were doing.”

“You know Pop’s password?” said Neal.

“2-4-0-3-1-2-0-3-2-9-0-9-0-6-1-2,” Gabi recited as she punched the numbers on the keyboard and pressed Enter. It let her in on the first attempt. “Doesn’t take a genius.”

“It doesn’t?” I asked.

“Dad uses our birthdays as a password for everything,” Nicholas explained.

“But doesn’t help us much,” said Gabi. “Somebody’s wiped the computer memory and took the hard drive. I _told_ Dad he needed to upgrade his operating systems.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, jumping into cop mode, as Jesse would have put it. “The thing you said was missing –”

Gabi got up and gestured for me to join her at the worktable. A bunch of her inventions stood on the shelf; I didn’t have the nerve to ask what any of them did. On the table, there was a square patch in the middle of the dust showing that something had recently been removed.

“It looked like a book with a bunch of knobs and dials on it.”

“Like a sort of steampunk medieval church Bible,” added Nicholas.

“And I found a burnt-out power cable over there,” said Gabi. “Looks like somebody pulled the plug when a whole lot of electricity was being pumped through –”

“Can you draw it?” asked a familiar voice. I turned to see George Spencer lurking in the shadows, smoking a small cigarette and overseeing a QuangTech technician who was passing a humming sensor over the ground. Cassandra looked at me apologetically.

“Well, well,” I said. “If it isn’t Mr George Albert Spencer. You mind telling me what QuangTech’s interest in Rumplestiltskin is?”

He ignored me. “Can you draw it?” he asked Gabi once again.

“The power cable?”

“No, you stupid girl. The _book._ ”

“Oi, mate.” Nicholas charged forwards and jabbed a stiff index finger into Spencer’s tie. “I don’t know what your bloody deal is, but don’t you barge into my parent’s house uninvited and insult my sister, you bloody stuck-up Toff –”

Neal pulled him back before Nicholas said something we’d all _really_ regret.

“He’s QuangTech, Nick,” I murmured. “You don’t want to get into it with them.”

“Perhaps _you_ could draw the missing object, Master Gold?” Spencer suggested.

Nicholas grudgingly took the pencil and paper that Spencer gave him. I looked over his shoulder as he sketched out an intricate combination of knobs, dials and a heavy-looking strap on the face of a rectangular box. He thrust it at Spencer as soon as he was done. Spencer studied it with great interest as another QuangTech technician walked in from outside.

“Well?” asked Spencer.

The agent saluted neatly and showed Spencer a pair of large and slightly molten G-clamps.

“Looks like Mr Gold had jury-rigged his own set of cables to the electrical sub-station. I just spoke to the electricity board. They said they had three unexplained power drains of about one point eight megawatts each around mid-morning today.

Spencer turned to me.

“You are no longer required, Officer Swan,” he told me. “This case is now under QuangTech jurisdiction.”

“Who did this?” I demanded, but Spencer didn’t take crap from anyone – least of all me. He wagged a finger in my direction.

“Now, now, Swan. You no longer have anything to do with this investigation. We’ll keep you informed of any developments. Or not. As I see fit. Mr Cassidy, Master and Miss Gold; we’ll be in touch.”

“It was Pan, wasn’t it?” I said, slowly and deliberately. Spencer stopped in mid-stride, and turned to face me.

“Pan is dead, Swan. Burned to a crisp on Route 93. Don’t spread your theories around town, girl. It might make you seem more unstable than you already are.”

He smiled without the least vestige of kindness and walked out of the garage to his waiting car.

 

I got back to Granny’s at about two in the morning. The John Milton weekend was ending with a disco. I took the back entrance and walked up the stairs undisturbed, the distorted beat of the music softening to a dull thud the further I got.

I opened my room door, kicked off my shoes – they landed somewhere, I didn’t really care where – and went into the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and then rested my forehead on the cold mirror, the events of the whole day playing over in my mind like a movie. It was all a mistake. I should never have come back to Storybrooke, that much was obvious. I’d speak to Graham in the morning and transfer out as soon as I could.

After a minute – during which I let myself cry – I lay on the bed still in my evening dress and stared at the ceiling tiles, trying to come to terms with the reality I had been denying all these years.

My brother had fucked up.

Nobody had ever bothered to put it in such simple terms before. The military tribunal spoke of ‘tactical errors in the heat of battle’ and ‘gross incompetence’ on the parts of both Leo and Major Frobisher. Somehow ‘fucked up’ made it more believeable. More _real._ We all make mistakes at some point in our lives, some more than others. It’s only when the cost is counted in human lives that people really take notice. If Leo had been a baker and forgot the yeast, nothing would have been made of it, but he would have fucked up all the same.

As I lay there thinking, I slowly drifted into sleep. And with sleep came troubled dreams. I was back at Mendel’s apartment block, only this time I was standing outside the back entrance with the upturned car, Commander Flanker and the rest of the SO-1 interview panel. Charlie Buckett was there too. He had a gaping hole in his stomach and was standing, arms crossed and looking at me as if I had taken his frisbee and he had sought out Flanker for some kind of redress.

“Are you _sure_ you didn’t tell Agent Buckett to cover the back?” asked Flanker.

“Positive,” I said.

“She did, you know,” said Pan, grinning evilly as he walked past. “I heard her.”

Flanker stopped him. “Did you? What _exactly_ did she say?”

Pan smiled at me and then nodded at Charlie, who returned his greeting.

“Wait!” I interrupted. “How can you believe what he says? The man’s a liar!”

Pan pouted like a toddler, and Flanker turned to me with a steely gaze.

“We only have _your_ word for that, Swan.”

I could feel myself boil with inner rage at the unfairness of it all. I was just about to cry out and wake up when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Nicholas, in a dark coat and a tie, looking just like a younger, red-haired version of his father.

“You don’t want to get into it with Pan, Emma,” he warned me in the same tone I’d used last night about Spencer. “Don’t make the same mistakes that Dad did.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, but Nicholas disappeared, replaced with a vision of Leo.

“You’ll know what to do when the time comes, big sis.”

“Leo?”

He nodded in return. But now we were no longer outside the warehouses in South Boston; we were on a smoky battlefield that I knew all too well.

“What are we doing here?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing here,” said Leo, walking over to a charred, unrecognisable corpse. He pulled its helmet off. “But I never left.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

He scraped a layer of charcoal off the helmet. “Things are becoming more urgent, Ems. I can feel it. A bad change in the wind. Time is out of joint.”

“That’s what Dad said.”

“People are gonna be counting on you,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard me. I could hear the sounds of the battle raging beyond the rise obscured by the smoke. The Confederate Cavalry would march into the valley any minute. “Rumple and Belle are counting on you. Neal’s counting on you. Don’t let them down like I let you down.”

“Leo, it wasn’t your fault!”

He looked at me with sad blue eyes. He was the only one to inherit Dad’s eyes.

“You’re about to wake up, Emma. Don’t worry. You’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

“Leo –”

A horn sounded and dark shadows appeared on the ridge. The fog rippled as artillery burst through the air. I flung myself to the ground to avoid the barrage and looked around for my brother, but he was gone. I didn’t have time to find him or question him further as my phone buzzed on the nightstand, and I woke up. I was still in my clothes from the previous evening, the light and the television still on.


	19. My brother, Jesse

‘Dearest Mother,

Life here in the **[Deleted by censor]** camp is great fun. The weather is good, food’s pretty average and the company’s A-OK. Major **[Deleted by censors]** is our CO; he’s really funny and I reckon you’d like him. I see Ems all the time, she’s good and settling in well. When she’s not sneaking off with Neal, that is. I know you told me to look after her, but she seems to be doing a good enough job of that herself. She won the battalion ladies’ boxing tournament last Wednesday. We move up to **[Deleted by censor]** next week. I promise I’ll write again as soon as I have more news.

Love, Leo’

\- Letter from Lt Leopold A. Nolan two weeks before he was killed in action

 

Apart from one other person I had the diner floor all to myself at six in the morning. Unfortunately, that one other person was Colonel Phoebus.

“Good morning, Corporal!” he said cheerfully as he spotted me trying to hide behind a copy of _The Mirror._

“Colonel.”

He sat down opposite me without asking.

“Good response to my presence here so far, y’know,” he said genially, taking some toast and waving a spoon at the waitress. “Miss? More coffee. That’s a good girl, thank you. We’re having the talk next Sunday. You _are_ still coming, I trust?”

“I _might_ make it there,” I replied, quite truthfully.

“Splendid! I have to confess, I thought you’d stumbled off the path when we spoke out at ol’ MacDonald’s place.”

“Where is it?”

“A bit hush-hush, old girl. Walls have ears, careless talk, all that rot. I’ll send a car for you. Have you seen this?”

I had; it was the front page of _The Storybrooke Mirror._ It was, like all the papers, almost exclusively devoted to the upcoming offensive that everyone thought was so likely that there didn’t seem even the slightest hope that it wouldn’t happen. The last major battle had been in ’06 and the memories and lessons of that particular mistake didn’t seem to have sunk in.

“I said more _coffee_!” roared Phoebus to the waiter, who had given him tea by mistake. I sighed; why couldn’t I have been dealing with Phoebus’ brother, who was far more reasonable and could actually hold a civilised conversation. “I’m telling you, Swan, this new plasma rifle is going to clinch it. I’ve even thought of modifying my talk to include a request for anyone wanting to claim lands on the front to start filing requests now. I understand from the Foreign Secretary’s office that we’ll need settlers to move in as soon as the Confederates are evicted for good.”

“Don’t you get it?” I asked exasperatedly. I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep to deal with this crap. “There won’t _be_ an end. Not as long as we’ve got troops on Confederacy soil.”

“What’s that?” said Phoebus. He fiddled with his hearing aid and cocked his head to one side like a parakeet. “Mmm? Eh?”

I made a non-committal noise and left as soon as I could.

 

It was early enough that the sun had risen but it was still cold. It must have rained at some point during the night; the air was heavy with water. As I drove, I rolled the windows down in an attempt to blow away the memories of the night before, the anger that had erupted when I realised that I couldn’t forgive Neal. It was the dismay that I would always feel the same rather than the dismay over the unpleasant ending to the evening – potential kidnappings aside – which upset me most. I was thirty-three, and had been alone for the past decade give or take a drunken tussle or two. Or eight. Another five or six years of this, and I knew that I’d be destined not to share my life with anyone.

I told myself that I was fine with that. I said it again just in case my heart hadn’t got the message.

The wind tugged at my hair as I drove rapidly along the sweeping road that led out of town. There was no traffic to speak of and the car was humming sweetly. Small pockets of fog had formed as the sun rose, and I drove through them as an airship flies through cloud. My foot rolled off the accelerator as I entered the small parcels of gloom, then gently pressed down again as I burst free into the morning sun once more.

 

There were two churches in Storybrooke. The new GSD parish used to be an Anglican church; old Friar Tuck adopted the change in the hopes of drawing some of the younger crowd’s attention. The older Catholic diocese had never had a priest, and was Catholic in name only. The Sisters of St Meissa all used to be fairies, and now they were nuns. There was supposed to be some sort of irony to it that I never really got.

I drove out to the convent – which was about a ten minute drive from Granny’s –parked on the road near the back entrance and turned off the engine, the silence of the country a welcome break. In the distance I could hear some farm machinery but it was barely a rhythmical hum. I’d never fully appreciated the peace of the country until I’d moved to the city.

I opened the gate and entered the well-kept graveyard, paused for a moment, and then ambled at a slow, respectful pace past the rows of well-tended graves. I hadn’t visited Leo’s memorial since the day I left for Boston, but I knew he wouldn’t have minded. Much that we’d appreciated about one another had been left unsaid. We’d been much too similar like that. In humour, in life and in love, we’d just understood. Leo had graduated from officer training school just a month before Neal and I arrived in Kentucky; he’d already made an impression amongst the company by the time we got there. Leo was attached to the brigade as a signals lieutenant. Neal and I were both privates. He, of course, ascended the ranks much quicker than I did and made sergeant in just under eighteen months. We didn’t _exactly_ mention our pre-existing relationship to the upper echelon, just in case they decided to separate us. Leo kept that secret. I’d felt like a schoolgirl, sneaking around the camp for forbidden trysts. In the beginning, Kentucky just seemed like a whole barrel of fun.

None of the bodies came home. It was a policy decision. But there was a public memorial wall in Washington D.C. and most of the deceased had private ones. Leo’s was near the end of the row furthest from the chapel, underneath the protective bough of an old yew and sandwiched between two other Kentucky memorials. It was well maintained, obviously weeded regularly, and fresh flowers had recently been placed there. I stood by the unsophisticated grey limestone tablet and read the inscription.

_1 st Lt. Leopold Alexander Nolan_

_15 November 1984 – 17 September 2006_

Simple and neat. Name, rank and the span of his life; not even a full twenty-two years. There was another stone not unlike this one, one thousand miles away, marking his grave near Perryville. Others hadn’t fared so well. Fourteen of my colleagues who’d been in the charge that day were still ‘unaccounted for’. It was military jargon for ‘not enough bits to identify’.

Then I felt somebody bop me on the back. It wasn’t hard, but since I didn’t think there was anybody around, I jumped anyway. Jesse was standing there, a slightly silly grin on his face.

“Morning, Doofus.”

“Hey, Jesse,” I replied, only slightly bemused. “You want me to break your nose again?”

“Fighting in a graveyard?” he said, sitting down beside me. “Come on. Give us a hug, sis.”

I did. It was the third hug we’d ever shared in our lives.

“Any news on Rumple and Belle?”

“I forgot how fast news travels around here.”

“Actually, Gabi told me what happened,” he said. “Or rather, I figured it out when she was up at two in the morning breaking apart our toaster.”

Oh, right. I’d forgotten that Jesse and Gabrielle lived together. My brother’s friendship with Neal’s sister was weird to think about, even though I knew I didn’t have to worry about a possibly awkward situation developing.

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. Then I asked, “How’d you know I’d be here?”

Jesse stretched so that he was leaning on his elbows, his hair glowing like white gold in the early morning sunshine. “I went round the diner for a coffee and saw Major Mess-Up sitting there. Dorothy said I’d just missed you; after I spotted him, I figured this was probably the most likely place you’d be.

“He’s a colonel now, believe it or not.”

Jesse stared at me. “You’re serious? God. And they wonder why the army hasn’t punched through the Confederate lines yet.” He laughed, a loud ‘Ha!’ that frightened a poor young sparrow digging for worms. “How’s the arm?”

“It’s okay. I played a joke on the doctor in Boston. While he was rebuilding the muscles in my arm, I asked him if I’d be able to play the violin once he was done. He said, ‘Of course!’ and I said, ‘Great, I couldn’t before!’”

Jesse just shook his head at me.

“NCD Christmas parties must be an absolute riot, sis. Quite possibly the worst joke I’ve heard in my life. You need to get out more.”

My baby brother could be infuriating at times, but he probably had a point. Not that I was going to let him know it. So instead I said, “Well, nuts to you, then.”

That _did_ make him laugh.

“You were always so damn serious, sis. It was the first thing I ever noticed about you. I remember how long it took for Mom to get you to even have dinner with us – Hello, Mrs Ginger!”

An old lady hobbled through the gate carrying a bunch of flowers.

“Oh, hello, Jesse!” she replied jovially, then squinted at me through her glasses and said in a loud whisper, “Is this your girlfriend?”

“No, Mrs Ginger – this is my sister, Emma. She’s SpecOps and consequently doesn’t have a sense of humour, a boyfriend or a life.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Mrs Ginger, who was both blind and deaf despite her thick glasses and giant ears.

“Hi, Mrs Ginger,” I said with a small wave. “Jesse here used to bash the bishop so much when he was a boy that we all thought he’d go blind.”

“Good, good,” she muttered.

Jesse, not to be outdone, added; “And Emma here made so much noise during sex that we had to put her out in the garden shed whenever her boyfriend stayed the night!”

I elbowed him in the ribs but Mrs Ginger didn’t notice. She smiled benignly – not bad for someone who used to be an actual witch – wished us both a lovely day, and teetered off further into the churchyard. We watched her go.

“A hundred and four next March, she is,” murmured Jesse, who had an incredible memory for birthdays. “Amazing, innit? When she goes, I’m thinking of having her stuffed and donated to the nuns as a hatstand.”

“Now I know you’re joking.”

He grinned. “Don’t have a serious bone in my body, sis. So, do you think Dad’s shagging Mary Lincoln?”

“He never mentioned it. Mind you, if you were having an affair with someone who died over a hundred years ago, would you tell your partner?”

“What about me?”

“What about you what?”

“Does he ever mention me?”

I shook my head and Jesse went quiet for a moment, which is unusual for him.

“It should’ve been me.”

“What?”

He was staring at Leo’s memorial with haunted green eyes, suddenly appearing ten years older – which, given that he normally looked like he was still nineteen, put him almost back at his actual age of thirty.

“It should’ve been me who died in that charge, Ems. You know Leo was always the favourite son.”

“That’s stupid, Jesse. And even if it were true – which it isn’t – there’s nothing anybody can do about it now. Leo is gone. Finished. Dead. You were in the back lines defusing landmines – what the hell were you going to do about it?”

“So why doesn’t Dad ever come and see me?”

I looked at him. He looked back out of the side of his eye. I got a strange feeling in my spine. This was a side of my little brother that I’d never seen before.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe it’s a ChronoGuard thing. You know, he doesn’t visit me that often. And when he does, it’s always business and never more than a couple of minutes.”

Jesse remained quiet. Eventually he let out a long sigh and a strangled laugh.

“Hah. So, you been attending church while in Boston?”

“No.” I was never much for religion; I’d bounced around too much to ever get attached to any particular church. “After the charge, I kind of lost what little faith I had.”

“Yeah. I was the opposite,” said Jesse quietly. “I was like you at the start. I’d spend hours every night going over what happened, wondering what I’d have done differently if I’d known, wondering how any all-powerful deity could let that happen and still claim to be benevolent.”

“Did you ever get an answer?”

“Nope. Sometimes I still wonder why it happened. Then I think about how much worse it could have been.”

“Worse?” I scoffed. “How the hell could it possibly have been worse?”

“I could’ve lost you, too.”

He said it so simply and suddenly that I was taken completely off guard. I made funny noises in the back of my throat as I tried to think of something to say.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I told him. He looked at me. “About not having a serious bone in your body.”

Jesse just laughed. “Yeah. It comes and goes. Don’t expect it to happen again for another ten years.”

He grinned. I grinned back. I’d run out of things to say.

“Mom keeps the memorial well, doesn’t she?” I said, changing the subject before things got awkward again.

“That’s not Mom, Doofus. Mom hasn’t been down here in ten years.”

“Then who?”

“Neal, of course. Didn’t he tell you?”

“What?”

Jesse reached over and pushed my jaw back into position. I swatted his hand away.

“No, he didn’t mention it.”

“Hey, he might draw dumb cartoons and be a bit of an all-around dork, but he’s a good guy. He knows how much Leo meant to you. And I think he thought of Leo a bit like his own brother too. He’s kinda like that; just gotta be everybody’s big brother.”

“But his testimony hung Leo out to dry –”

Jesse silenced me by putting a finger over my lips. He made a ‘Come closer’ beckon before I could hit him again and leant towards me, lowering his voice to just a whisper.

“Sister dearest, I know this is an old cliché but it’s true: _the first casualty of war is always the truth._ Neal was just trying to redress that. Don’t think it doesn’t haunt him too, what he did – it would always have been easier to lie and clear Leo’s name. But a small lie always breeds a bigger one. The military’s got enough of those as it is. Neal knew that. So did Leo.”

I glanced at him, then looked down at the grass and thought. Maybe Jesse had a point. Maybe he was even right; I couldn’t say for sure. I let out a sigh. I knew I had to say something to Neal but I had no idea what that would be. I just hoped I would think of something. Ten years ago, right before he gave his evidence at the tribunal, he’d asked me to marry him. Later I accused him of attempting to gain my hand by stealth, knowing what my reaction would be following the hearing. I had left for Boston before the week was out.

“I think I’d better call him.”

Jesse smiled.

“Yeah, I think you should – _Doofus._ ”


	20. Dr Runcible Spoon

‘My mother used to say that she could feel destiny tugging at her sleeve. I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about. Few of us have any real idea what it is we are here to do and when it is that we are to do it. Every small act has a knock-on consequence that goes on to affect those around us in unseen ways. I wonder what it would be like to have such a clear purpose in life. I think I would go mad.’

Emma Swan, _A Life in SpecOps_

 

Cassandra and Roland hadn’t yet arrived when I got to the office; I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk. I called Neal’s number but it was engaged. I tried again a few minutes later without luck. Grub called from the front desk to say that he was sending somebody up who wanted to talk to Cassandra. I twiddled my thumbs for a bit, and had failed to reach Neal for a third time when a small, academic-looking man with an overpowering aura of untidiness shambled into the office. He wore a small bowler hat and a herringbone-pattern shooting jacket pulled hastily over what looked like his pyjama top. His briefcase had papers protruding from where he had caught them in the lid and the laces of both his shoes were tied in reef knots. He looked around absently like a man trying to determine exactly where he was in a very small building.

“You’re looking for Officer Cassandra Cole and you’re in the right place,” I said, glad that I’d had plenty of experience with academics in the past. LiteraTechs sometimes cross into NCD jurisdiction when it comes to the folk tales. The Grimm Brothers were a particular headache.

“I am?” he asked with great surprise, as though he had long ago accepted that he would always end up in the wrong place.

“I’m Officer Emma Swan,” I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. He took it weakly and tried to raise his hat with the hand that was holding the briefcase. He gave up and tipped his hat instead.

“Er – thank you, Miss Swan. My name is Dr Runcible Spoon, Professor of English Literature at New York University. I expect you’ve heard of me?”

“I’m sure it was only a matter of time, Dr Spoon. Would you like to sit down? I don’t think Cassandra will be too long. Coffee?”

“Er, yes – thank you very much.”

I made Dr Spoon a coffee that he didn’t notice, too absorbed in the collection of books stacked behind Cassandra’s desk. Every now and again he would stop and stroke the spine of a rare book. I remained quiet – I figured we would both be more comfortable that way – and waited for Cassandra to arrive. Thankfully, she wasn’t long.

“Hi, hi, sorry I’m late!” she wheezed on her way in, chucking her coat hurriedly on the rack. “Sorry, Emma, I did get your text. Dr Spoon, is it?”

“Er, yes – thank you. Officer Cole?”

Cassandra nodded and slid into her desk chair. “So, how can I be of assistance, Doctor?”

“Perhaps I should show you, Miss Cole.”

Spoon rummaged in his case for a minute, taking out some unmarked students’ work and a paisley-patterned sock before finally finding and handing Cassandra a heavy blue-bound volume.

“Joseph Jacob’s 1890 _English Fairy Tales,_ ” Spoon explained, pushing all of the papers back into the case and wondering why they seemed to have expanded since he took them out. “I marked the page.”

I sipped my coffee and listened in. I didn’t have anything better to do.

“See what I mean?”

“I’m sorry, Dr Spoon,” said Cassandra after reading the section that was marked with the doctor’s Greyhound pass. “My area of speciality is the Greek epics and Victorian literature. You’re going to have to enlighten me.”

“A student pointed it out to me yesterday evening,” said Spoon. “I hopped on a bus immediately afterwards. Did you know there is not a single LiteraTech in New York who knows anything about fairy tales? Incredible. On the bottom of page 187 is the passage where young Jack meets the mysterious merchant who trades three magic beans for Jack’s cow. A Mr Elwood, who is revealed in the resolution to be Jack’s long-lost father. If you look at the marked section –” Spoon turned to the appropriate page – “Mr Elwood has vanished from the end of the story.”

I got up. “Did you say Mr Elwood?”

Both Cassandra and Dr Spoon turned to me. “You know him?” asked Cassandra.

“Not personally, no. But I know the story. Can I see the book?”

“Emma’s NCD; fairy tales are her speciality,” Cassandra explained.

“You’re sure this isn’t a printing error?” I asked with a growing sense of unease.

Dr Spoon shook his head. “No, Officer. My student and I went through seven different copies and they all read exactly the same. _Mr Elwood is no longer with us._ ”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” I murmured.

“I agree.”

I felt uneasy about the whole thing. There was a link between Pan, George Spencer and Mr Elwood’s disappearance somewhere – I knew it. I just didn’t know what it was.

My phone rang. It was Roland. He asked if Cassandra was there and asked me to put him on speaker.

“Alright, go ahead.”

“I need you two to come down to the morgue right away,” he said, his voice tinny over the phone.

“Okay. Why?”

While Roland spoke I looked over at Dr Spoon, who was staring at a food stain he had discovered on his tie.

“Actually,” I replied slowly, “considering what just happened here, I don’t think that sounds weird at all.”

 

The morgue was located in the hospital basement, and badly in need of refurbishment. The interior was musty and smelt of formaldehyde and damp. The only employee looked unhealthy and shuffled around the confines of the small building in a funeral manner. The standard joke about Storybrooke’s morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma. Although, to be fair, the doctor was Victor Frankenstein, and there were some who thought that the good doc’s body-animating antics hadn’t _quite_ ended when he found himself in Alaska thirty-three years ago.

Looking at the shuffling man carrying a tray of instruments into the pathology lab, I decided the theory might not be so outlandish.

Frankenstein didn’t acknowledge Cassandra and I when we entered, but continued to speak into a microphone hanging from the ceiling.

“Body is male, of European ethnicity, aged about forty with grey hair and poor dentition. He is approximately five foot eight inches tall and dressed in a vaguely Victorian outfit …”

“Morning, Emma,” said Roland cheerfully. “Remember the Studebaker belonging to Mr Darling’s murderer?”

“Yeah.”

“Found the body in the boot.”

“Any ID?” asked Cassandra. Roland nodded.

“Yup. This is Mr John Elwood of Number 96, Andersen Street. Have a look at this.”

He pointed to a stainless steel tray containing the corpse’s possessions. There was half a pencil, an unpaid bil for starching collars, a letter dated to October 20, 1887 and what looked like a bean sprout.

“Hang on, that can’t be Mr Elwood,” said Cassandra. “I’ve seen him around before.”

“Yup, so have I,” Roland agreed. “Looks a bit too young, doesn’t he?”

“And his clothes – oh, my God!”

I stared at both of them. “Guys, what’s going on?”

“Come on, we’d better speak in private.”

They led me into the corridor. Cassandra quickly relayed everything that Dr Spoon had told us. Roland did not look surprised in the least.

“Guys!” I shouted, feeling like I was being left out of something extremely important. “What the hell is going on?”

Roland and Cassandra looked at each other.

“Did you ever read _The Taming of the Shrew?”_ asked Cassandra.

“I think so, back when I was in high school. Why?”

“Do you remember the drunken tinker in the introduction who is made to think that he’s a lord, and the one they put the play on for?”

“Sure. Christopher Sly, right?”

“He has a few lines at the end of Act One,” said Roland, “and that’s the last we ever hear of him.”

I still didn’t get it.

“Six years ago,” Cassandra went on, “an uneducated drunk who spoke entirely in Elizabethan English wandered into Granny’s Diner. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out. I managed to question him for half an hour, and in that time he convinced me that he was the genuine article. But he never seemed to realise that he was no longer in his own play.”

“Wait,” I said, realisation dawning. “Are you saying –?”

“That the barrier between fiction and reality is a lot softer than we think. We’re PDRs; we should know that better than anybody. Think of it like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through. By morning, the hole is frozen over again,” said Cassandra. “He came out of a book.”

“But Mr Elwood lived _here!_ He had a house, a dog, a job –”

“And is nearly seventy-eight years old,” said Cassandra. “Does that guy look seventy-eight to you?”

I shook my head.

“Look,” said Roland, lowering his voice. “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Don’t spread it around, but we’ve seen some … well, let’s call it a _reset_ , if you like. PDRs acting like their normal selves one minute, the next it’s like they’ve gone back in time. All of a sudden, _poof!_ They’re back in Fairy Tale clothing, believe that they’re in the Enchanted Forest, no memory of the Land Without Magic at all. Most of them even seem to reverse in age.”

“How the hell does that happen?” I asked.

Roland just shrugged. “No bloody clue.”

I had more questions, but at that moment the shambling warden appeared in the corridor and asked us to come in. Dr Frankenstein had finished his initial examination.

“One shot through the heart, very clean, very professional. Everything about the body otherwise normal except evidence of ricketts in childhood. Very poor dental work and lice. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t had a bath for at least a month. There’s not much more I can tell you except that his last meal was suet, mutton and ale. There’ll be more when the tissue samples come back from the lab.”

Roland, Cassandra and I all exchanged looks. Then we left hurriedly after thanking Frankenstein, the outside air a welcome refreshment after the stuffy stench of formaldehyde.

“The thing I don’t get is,” said Cassandra as we walked towards the car, “nobody who’s experienced a reset has ever disappeared from their own narrative. The stories have always remained consistent. So how does Mr Elwood just vanish from _every_ copy of _Jack and the Beanstalk?_ ”

“For that matter, why did he turn up dead?” said Roland.

“Pan,” I murmured.

They both looked at me.

“Okay, I know you think I’m crazy –”

“No, I know you’re crazy and I just saw a dead forty-year-old man where an almost eighty-year-old should have been,” said Roland. “Hit me with it.”

“Pan’s alive.”

Neither of them looked surprised.

“He’s got something to do with this, I know it,” I went on. If I could trust anybody in the world, it was Roland and Cassandra. We would all be pensioned off if any of this got out. “Yesterday, he kidnapped both Rumplestiltskin and Belle and took some invention that they’d been working on. Gabi didn’t know what it did but –”

I trailed off.

“But what?” asked Cassandra.

“What if they were trying to figure out a way to get back to the Enchanted Forest?” I said finally. “And what if Pan figured out what they were up to, stole the device, and –”

“Used it to kill off a secondary character in a minor English folk tale?” asked Roland.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it was a warning. Maybe he’s got other plans. There are much bigger fish than Mr Elwood in Jacobs’ _English Fairy Tales._ ”

“But then why isn’t he telling us?”

 

But he was. When we got back a letter was waiting for me at the station. I had hoped it was a letter from Neal but it wasn’t. It bore no stamp and had been left on the desk that morning. No-one had seen who delivered it.

I called Graham into the deputies’ office as soon as I saw the signature and shown it to Roland and Cassandra, laying the sheet of paper on my desk to avoid touching it any more than I had to. Graham read it aloud.

“ _Dear Emma, when I heard that you had returned to Storybrooke I almost believed in divine intervention. It seems that we will at last be able to sort out our differences. Mr Elwood was just for starters. Jack himself is next unless I receive the following; $10 million USD in used notes and a Gainsborough, preferably the one with the boy in blue. I would also like for the Union College of Surgeons to accept the research application of my friend Doctor Louis Stevenson, and I want you to rename a bridge ‘Leigh Hamelin after the grandmother of an associate. Signal your readiness by placing a small ad in the Wednesday edition of the_ Storybrooke Mirror _announcing Angora rabbits for sale and I will give you further instructions.”_

Graham sat down.

“It’s signed Pan. _English Fairy Tales_ without Jack?” he exclaimed earnestly, tugging uncomfortably at his collar. “That would eliminate half the main characters!”

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“Well, unless you’ve got a Gainsborough you don’t want and ten million in loose change, we take this to Weselton.”

 

George Spencer was in Oskar Weselton’s office when we entered. He didn’t offer to leave when we told Weselton it was important and Weselton didn’t ask him to.

“What is it?” asked Weselton, glancing at Spencer, who was practising his putting on the carpet.

“Pan is alive,” I said.

“Well, dearie me,” muttered Spencer in an entirely unconvincing tone. “That is a surprise.”

We ignored him.

“Read this,” said Graham, handing across Pan’s note in a cellophane wrapper. Weselton read it before passing it to Spencer.

“Place the ad, Officer Swan,” said Weselton loftily. “You seem to have impressed Pan enough for him to trust you. I’ll speak to my superiors about his demands and you can inform me when he contacts you again.”

He stood up to signal that the interview had ended but I stayed where I was.

“With all due respect, sir, but what the hell is going on?”

“That’s classified, Swan. We’d like you to make the drop for us but that’s the only way you can be involved in this operation. Mr Spencer has an extremely well-trained squad behind him who will take care of Mr Gold’s capture. Good day.”

I still didn’t move.

“You’re going to have to tell me more, sir. I know Rumplestiltskin and Belle are involved, and I care about them a great deal. So if you want me to play ball then I want to know what’s going on.”

Weselton looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “I’m afraid –”

“Tell her,” interjected Spencer.

Weselton looked at Spencer, who continued to practise his putting.

“Why don’t _you_ take the honour, Mr Spencer?” Weselton suggested angrily. “It’s _your_ show, after all.”

Spencer shrugged and finished his putt. The ball hit its mark and he smiled.

“Over the last thirty years there has been an inexplicable cross-fertilisation between works of fiction and reality. The existence of this town is all down to that, as you know. But it goes much further than that. We know that Mr Locksley and Miss Cole have been investigating the phenomenon for some time. Until recently, we belived it to be a one-way trip. Mr and Mrs Gold changed all that for us.”

“So I was right?” I demanded. “That thing they were building – it’s a way of getting back to the Enchanted Forest?”

Spencer ignored me and polished his putter with a large red spotted handkerchief.

“For some time now, the QuangTech Advanced Weapons Division has been working on a device that will open a door into a work of fiction. After almost thirty years of research and untold expenditure, all we have managed to do is synthesise a poor-quality Cheddar from volumes one to eight of _The World of Cheese._ We knew that Pan was interested, and there was talk of clandestine experiments here in Storybrooke. I believe, if you check the records, you will find that a number of rare and _unique_ manuscripts have recently been stolen from high-security lockups – the Brothers Grimm, Barbot de Villenauve, Jacobs, Perrault, Mother Goose, et cetera. Rumplestiltskin’s kidnapping suggested that he had perfected the machine with the help of his friend Mr Jefferson Hatter, and Mr Elwood’s unfortunate demise proved it. We’ll get Pan, I assure you, but it’s the machine that we really want.”

“Go ahead and try,” I said, slowly rising from my seat. “But I know Rumplestiltskin. And I know he’d sooner destroy the idea than sell it to you.”

“Oh, believe me, Miss Swan.” Spencer’s eye twinkled in a way I loathed. “I can handle the Dark One without his powers.”

“You’re wrong,” I said obstinately, turning to leave. “He might not have magic anymore, but he’s still the smartest man I’ve ever met. He won’t sell to you. He’d sooner shoot himself in the foot. Gideon dropped out of Harvard Med because he got fed up with student competition overtaking the desire to actually _help_ sick people. Gabi destroys anything she believes could have devastating military potential – what makes you think their father is any different? If scientists just stopped for a minute to think about the possible effects of their discoveries, the planet would be a much safer place for all of us.”

Spencer grinned and clapped his hands mockingly.

“Did anyone ever tell you how much you and your mother are alike, Miss Swan? Hmm? If you want your refrigerator and your car and a nice house and asphalt on the roads and a decent public health service, then thank the weapons industry. Thank the war economy that drives us to this and thank QuangTech. The war is good, Swan – good for the Union and especially good for the economy. You deride the weapons business but without it we’d be a tenth-rate country struggling to maintain a standard of living anywhere near that of our European counterparts. Would you prefer that?”

“At least our hands would be clean of the blood of thousands of innocent people.”

“Naïve, Swan, very naïve.”

Spencer returned to his golf and Weselton took up the explanation;

“Officer Swan, we are extending all possible support to QuangTech Corporation in these matters. We want you to help us capture Pan. You were romantically involved with a relative of his and he addressed this to you. We’ll agree to his demands and arrange a drop. Then we tail him and arrest him. Simple. QuangTech get the portal, we get the manuscripts, your ex-fiancé’s parents are freed, and SO-5 get Pan. Everyone gets something, so everyone is happy. For now, we’re all to just sit tight and wait for news of the drop.”

“I know the rules on giving in to extortionists as well as you do, sir. Pan is not one to try and fool.”

“It won’t come to that,” replied Weselton. “We’ll give him the money and nab him long before he gets away. I have complete confidence in Mr Spencer’s operatives.”

“With all due respect, sir, Pan is smarter and tougher than you could possibly imagine. We should do this on our own. We don’t need Spencer’s hired guns blasting off in all directions.”

“Permission denied, Swan. You’ll do as I tell you or you’ll do nothing. That is all.”

 

I should have been more angry but I wasn’t. There had been no surprises – QuangTech _never_ compromised. And when there are no surprises, it’s harder to get riled up. We would just have to work with what we got given.

When I got back to the office I called Neal again. This time a woman answered; I asked to speak to him.

“He’s asleep,” she said shortly.

“Can you wake him?” I asked. “It’s important.”

“No, I can’t. Who are you?”

“I’m Emma Swan.”

The woman gave a small snigger that I didn’t like. Not one bit.

“He told me all about you, Emma.”

She said it disdainfully; I took an instant dislike to her.

“Who _is_ this?”

“This is Tamara Medlar, dear. I’m Neal’s _fiancée._ ”

I leant back in my chair and closed my eyes. This couldn’t be happening. No wonder Neal asked me as a matter of urgency if I could ever forgive him.

“Changed your mind, have you, darling?” asked Tamara in a mocking tone. “Neal’s a good man. He waited nearly ten years for you but I’m afraid he’s in love with me now. Perhaps if you’re lucky we’ll send you some cake, and if you want to send a present, the wedding list is down at Camp Hopson.”

I forced down a lump in my throat. “When’s the happy day?”

“For you or for me?” Tamara laughed. “For you, who knows? As for me, Neal and I are going to be Mr and Mrs Cassidy two weeks on Saturday.”

“Let me talk to him,” I demanded.

“I _might_ tell him you called when he wakes up.”

“Do you want me to come round and bang on the door?” I asked, my voice rising. Cassandra looked at me from her desk with an arched eyebrow.

“Listen here, you stupid bitch,” said Tamara in a hushed tone. “You could have married Neal ten years ago and you blew it. It’s over. Go and find some geeky LiteraTech or an NCD with a tail – from what I’ve seen, all you SpecOps clowns are a bunch of weirdos.”

“Now, listen here –”

“No, _you_ listen,” she snapped. “If you try anything at all to interfere with my wedding day, I’ll snap your pretty little neck!”

The phone went dead. I quietly returned the receiver to its cradle and took my jacket from the back of the chair.

“Where’re you going?” asked Cassandra.

“The shooting range. And I’ll probably be a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Been a while! If you're also reading BAMSR'd or Intervention, this is just a heads-up that I'm extending my hiatus another month - nothing bad, just a lot of schoolwork. I will be back by November!


	21. The Waiting Game

‘To Pan, the loss of every Felix brought back the sadness of the first Felix’s death. On that occasion it had been a terrible blow; not only the loss of a trusted friend and colleague in crime, his most loyal compatriot who had journeyed from Neverland on a shadow to find him, but also the terrible realisation that the alien emotions of loss that Pan had felt betrayed his human origins, something he abhorred. Like Pan, Felix was truly debased and amoral. Sadly for Felix, he did not share any of Pan’s more demonic attributes and had stopped a bullet in the stomach the day that he and Pan attempted to rob the QuangTech bank at Hartlepool in 2008. Felix accepted his death stoically, urging his friend to “carry on the good work” before Pan quietly put him out of his misery. Out of respect for his friend’s memory, he removed Felix’s face and carried it with him away from the crime scene. Every servant _expropriated_ from the public since then had been given the dubious honour of not only being named after Pan’s one true friend, but also of wearing his features.’

Sidney Glass, _Fairy Tales in the Modern World: The Lost Boys_

 

Graham placed the ad in the _Storybrooke Mirror._ It was two days before we sat in his office to compare notes.

“We’ve had seventy-two calls,” said Roland. “They were all about the rabbits, though.”

“You did put them kind of low, Graham,” I put in.

“Well, I don’t know how much a rabbit costs,” said Graham with a shrug. “It seemed like a fair price to me.”

Roland opened a file on the table. “Forensics finally got an ID on the guy you shot in John Darling’s apartment. He had no fingerprints and you were right about the face, Emma; it wasn’t his.”

“So who was he?”

“Apparently he was an accountant from Brooklyn named Adrian Smarts. Went missing two years ago. No criminal record – not even a speeding fine. He was married eight years, father of two, an elder at his church, enthusiastic charity worker. He was a good man.”

“Pan stole his will,” I muttered. “The cleaner the soul, the easier they’d be to ruin. I doubt there was much left of him by the time we shot him. What about the face?”

“They’re still working on that. Reckon it’ll be harder to identify. According to forensics, Smarts wasn’t the only one to wear that face.”

A dreadful thought hit me. “So who’s to say he’ll be the last?”

Graham and Roland both came to the same conclusion; Graham picked up the phone and called Weselton. Within twenty minutes, an SO-14 squad had surrounded the funeral parlour where Smarts’ body had been released to his family. They were too late. The face that Smarts had worn for the past two years was gone. Security cameras, unsurprisingly, had seen nothing.

 

The news of Neal’s upcoming wedding had hit me pretty hard, to say the least. I later found out that Tamara Medlar was someone he met at a writer’s convention a little over a year earlier. She was pretty and beguiling, apparently, but a bit overweight, I liked to think. She had no great mind either, or at least that’s what I told myself. Neal had said he wanted children, and I guessed he deserved them. In coming to terms with this, I tentatively accepted Graham’s clumsy lunch invitation. We didn’t have a whole lot in common except our PDRness, and all the weird crap that goes along with that. I eventually brought up my family and _Richard III,_ and shortly discovered that Graham had a keen hobby in who _really_ wrote Shakespeare’s plays. I stared at my cocoa, listening to the early bird bustle at Granny’s Diner, trying to ignore the looks Dorothy kept throwing me, while Graham talked avidly. I was struck by how much he sounded like Belle, and thought the two of them would make great friends.

“Like most people, I suspect there’s much more to Shakespeare than meets the eye,” he said over a grilled cheese sandwich. “But Sir Francis Bacon using a little-known actor as a front? I don’t buy it. The Baconian argument largely hinges on the amount of legal parlance in the plays, but Greene, Nash and Ben Johnson all used legal phraseology, and none of them had legal training.”

“Agreed,” I said, knowing a decent bit of the subject matter thanks to lengthy discussions with Belle about the Baconian theory. “But what makes you so sure?”

“If you read his _De Augmentis Scientarium_ , you’ll find Bacon actually criticising popular drama. Furthermore, when the troupe Shakespeare belonged to applied to King James to form a theatre, they were referred to the commissioner for suits. Guess who was on the panel and most vociferously opposed the application?”

“Francis Bacon?”

“Exactly. Whoever wrote the plays, it wasn’t Bacon. Have you ever heard of Edward de Vere, the seventeeth Earl of Oxford?”

“Vaguely,” I said, thinking that the name sounded familiar. Cassie had probably mentioned him at some point.

“Well, there is some proof that he could actually write, and pretty well at that. Meres mentioned as much in his _Palladis Tamia_ of 1598.”

“So he could have written the plays?” I asked.

“He _could_ have,” replied Graham. “The problem is that Meres goes on to list a lot of Shakespeare’s plays and credits them to William Shakespeare. So that puts Oxford, like Derby and Bacon, into the front-man theory, meaning Will was just the beard for greater geniuses now lost to history.”

“So it’s impossible then?”

“Not necessarily. The White Queen used to believe six impossible things before breakfast and it never did her any harm.”

“Have you ever _met_ the White Queen?”

Graham made an amused face. “Look, all I’m saying is that there are a few more things that favour Oxford as Shakespeare over Bacon. The theory goes that Oxford and a group of courtiers were employed by the court of Queen Elizabeth to produce plays that painted the government in a positive light. Like portraying Richard III as a villain to trump up the image of Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII. Now, Oxford was given an annual grant of a thousand pounds for just such a purpose, although the fact is that we just don’t know whether that was for writing the plays or a different project altogether. There’s no positive evidence that he wrote the plays. A few lines of poetry similar to Shakespeare’s survive, but it’s not conclusive. Neither is the lion shaking a spear on Oxford’s coat of arms. And he died in 1604.”

“So definitely impossible then.”

Graham nodded. “Even the White Queen couldn’t argue with that. No, the front-man theory just doesn’t seem to work. I highly doubt that Shakespeare was really a nobleman anxious to remain anonymous. Nah, I reckon we should be looking at a different Elizabethan commoner.”

I frowned. “You mean Christopher Marlowe?”

“The very same,” said Graham with a wink. Then his phone rang. “Excuse me. Hello? Yeah. Yep, she’s here. Alright, we’ll be right over.”

He hit the hang-up button. “That was Roland; Pan’s been in touch. Spencer wants us all in Weselton’s office in half an hour.”


	22. The Drop

‘I was to make the drop. I’d never held a case containing $10 million before. In fact, I wasn’t then and never have. George Spencer, in all his arrogance, had assumed he would catch Pan long before he got to look at the money. The Gainsborough’s paint was barely dry and the Union College of Surgeons weren’t playing ball. The only part of Pan’s deal that had been honoured was the changing of the motorway service’s name. Kingston St Michael was now Leigh Hamelin.’

Emma Swan, _A Life in SpecOps_

 

Weselton outlined the plan to us soon after – there was an hour to go until the drop. That was Spencer’s way of ensuring that none of us tried to make our own plans. In every way, this was a QuangTech operation. Graham and I were only there to add credibility in case Pan was watching. The drop was to take place at the old, abandoned toll bridge, which was out near the woods and had only one access road. QuangTech operatives covered the road and were ordered to let Pan in, but not out. It all seemed pretty straightforward.

On paper, anyway.

 

The ride out to the disused toll bridge was uneventful, although the phoney Gainsborough took up more room in the bug than I imagined. Spencer’s men were well hidden. Graham and I didn’t see a single soul as we drove to the deserted spot.

The bridge was still in good condition, even though it had long since ceased to function. Somebody had painted a letter ‘r’ in red on the sign, so that it read ‘Troll Bridge’. Kids had been known to dress up and haunt the place on Hallowe’en as a joke. I parked the car a little way off and walked alone to the bridge. The day was fine and there was barely a sound in the air. I looked over the parapetbut couldn’t see anything remiss, just the cold water gushing over the rocks with little patches of frost fighting the river’s current. Small shrubberies grew along the river banks. Deeper into the forest I spotted a gleam reflecting off the top half of a periscope pointed in my direction. I assumed it was one of Spencer’s men and looked at my watch. It was time.

The muffled sound of a cell phone ringing caught my attention. I looked around and tried to figure out where it was coming from.

“I can hear a phone ringing,” I reported into my walkie.

“It’s not one of ours,” Spencer responded from the control base in a deserted farmhouse a quarter of a mile away. “Find it.”

That part turned out to be easy; the phone was wrapped in plastic and stashed in the branches of a tree on the far side of the bridge. It was Pan and it was a bad line – it sounded as though he was in a car somewhere.

“Emma?”

“I’m here.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“How are you? I’m sorry I had to do what I did, but you know how desperate we psychopaths get.”

“Are Rumple and Belle okay?”

“Of course, darling! Enjoying themselves tremendously; such a brilliant intellect the old boy has, and his wife’s not a bad mind either. But so _terribly_ good, and such an awful influence on my dear old Rumple. It’s too bad. If it weren’t for her, between Rumple’s mind and my drive we could rule the globe instead of resorting to all this banal extortion.”

“You could finish it right now,” I told him.

Pan ignored me and carried on: “Don’t try anything heroic, Emma. You know well that I can do much worse than kill poor Mr Elwood, and I am not in the least afraid to do so.”

“Where are you?”

“Tut, tut, Emma. Who do you think you’re talking to? We’ll discuss the terms for your dear ex-boyfriend’s parents’ release just as soon as I have my money. You’ll see on the parapet a karabiner attached to a length of wire. Place the money and the Gainsborough on the parapet and clip them on. Once that’s done, I’ll come and pick them up. Until we meet again, Emma Swan!”

 I relayed to the others what he had said. They told me I should do as I was told, so I did.

When that was done, I walked back to the car, sat on the bonnet and watched Pan’s booty intently. Ten minutes went by. Then half an hour. I radioed Graham for advice but he just told me to stay where I was.

A colder breeze picked up and I regretted not bringing a warmer jacket. I could smell the faint odour of ozone, indicating a possible rainstorm on the way, and hear far off the gentle thrum of traffic. It looked as though Pan was testing us, not an unusual occurrence in the delicate task of paying ransoms. When the Poet Writer General was kidnapped six years previously, it had taken nine attempts before the ransom was successfully delivered. In any case, the PWG was returned unharmed – it turned out that Mr Rip van Winkle had engineered the whole thing himself as a way to escape his nagging wife for a couple of days.

I got bored and walked up to the parapet again, ignoring Spencer’s orders to back off. I toyed with the karabiner and absently followed the high-tensile cable that had been looped around the railings, down to a patch of loose soil at the foot of the bridge. Intrigued, I pulled it up slowly and found it attached to a bungee cord, coiled like a snake underneath the dirt. I traced the bungee back to another length of high-tensile braided cable. This was taped carefully to a telegraph pole and then stretched ten feet above my head in a large double loop to another pole on the other side of the bridge. I frowned as the low growl of an engine made me turn. I couldn’t see anything but the engine was definitely coming towards me, and quite quickly. I looked along the gravel bed of the road leading to the bridge, expecting to see a four-wheel-drive, but there was nothing. The noise of the engine then increased tenfold as a light aircraft appeared over the treetops, where it had obviously flown in low to avoid detection.

“Plane!” I shouted into my walkie-talkie. “They’ve got a plane!”

Then the firing began. It was impossible to say who started it, or even where it came from, but in an instant the quiet countryside was filled with the sharp, directionless crackle of small-arms fire. I jumped over the parapet and into the river, receiving a horrible shock to my system as freezing water splashed me and soaked my boots and pants. My army training kicked in quickly, and I took cover beneath the bridge as several rounds hit the parapet, throwing up splinters and broken bits of stone and gravel. I pulled out my automatic and released the safety, the plane now almost overhead. It was the sort of high-wing observation planes that they used on the warfront for artillery spotting; the side door had been removed and sitting half out of the plane with one foot on the wing strut was Pan. He held a light machinegun and was blazing away quite happily at everything in sight. I could _hear_ his demonic laughter. He peppered the dilapitated t(r)oll bridge sign and the QuangTech men returned fire with equal enthusiasm; I could already see several holes open up in the plane’s fabric. Behind the plane, swinging in the slipstream, trailed a grapnel hook. As it passed over, the hook caught the wire strung between the telegraph poles and whisked off the briefcase and the painting, the bungee cord taking the initial strain out of the pick-up. I climbed back onto the bridge and started to fire at the retreating plane, but it banked steeply away and began to climb, the bag and the fake Gainsborough flapping dangerously on the end of the rope mere inches above the treetops. To delay now would definitely mean losing them and maybe the last chance to catch Pan, so I sprinted to the bug and reversed out in a shower of earth and gravel. Graham clung on grimly and reached for his seat belt.

But the aeroplane hadn’t quite finished with us. The small craft went into a shallow dive to gain more airspeed then pulled up into a near vertical left bank, the port wingtip scraping through the tops of the pines as the pilot turned back towards us. A Studebaker full of QuangTech men had set off after the aircraft but braked violently as it came skidding towards them, the pilot booting a full left rudder to allow Pan a better view of his target. The black car was soon a mess of small bullet holes and it swung into the river. I stamped on the brakes as another Studebaker pulled in front of me. It too was blasted by Pan and careened into a tree. The plane flew over us, the painting so low that it banged on the roof of my car, the rattle of gunfire now only weakly returned by Spencer’s men.

I slammed hard on the accelerator, making Graham swear, and drove off in pursuit of the aircraft, past the two shattered cars and back onto the road. It was a straight stretch ahead of us and Pan’s plane was labouring against a slight headwind; with a bit of luck, we could catch them. At the end of the straight there was a fork and a gated entry to a field. The plane continued straight, over the field. Graham looked at me.

“Which way?!” he yelled.

As an answer, I pulled out my gun, aimed it at the gate and fired. The first two shots missed but the next three hit their mark; the hinges shattered and the gate collapsed as I bounced into the field, which happened to be populated by a herd of sheep, baa’ing in surprise at the sight of a lemon-yellow Volkswagen bug suddenly appearing in their paddock. The plane droned on, and while not exactly gaining on it I thought we did at least seem to be keeping up.

“In pursuit of suspects in aeroplane heading, er, north-west-ish, I think,” Graham yelled into the police wireless.

The unfortunate fact was – an aircraft was the one thing that nobody had thought of. The only airfield anywhere near us was only equipped to service crop dusters and a search-and-rescue helicopter, which would never get airbourne fast enough to cut off Pan’s escape.

We carried on down a shallow slope, dodging confused ewes and making for the far end of the field, where a farmer in his Land Rover was just closing the gate. He looked as perplexed as his sheep when he saw the mud-splattered bug fast approaching him but opened the gate anyway. I yanked the wheel hard over, turned right and slewed broadside down the road with one rear wheel in the ditch before I recovered and accelerated rapidly, now at right angles to where we wanted to go. The next turning on the left was into another farm, so in we went, scattering frightened chickens in all directions as we searched for a way out into the fields beyond. The aircraft was still visible, but detours like this one only increased the distance between us.

“MacDonald farm!” Graham shouted into the wireless. Whether there was anybody left who was still interested in our progress, I neither knew nor cared. I found my way past the farmyard and out through the orchard by way of a barbed-wire fence that put five deep horizontal scratches along the paintwork of my car. We drove faster across the grass, bumping heavily over hardened ruts. Twice the car bottomed out, but at last we were making headway. As we pulled up beneath the plane, it abruptly banked left. I did likewise, re-entering the forest via a logging track. We could just see the plane above us through the foliage that flicked and rushed above our heads.

“Emma –!” yelled Graham above the rasp of the engine.

“What?!”

“Road!”

“Road?”

“ _ROAD!_ ”

We hit the road at full speed and were lifted off the ground by the camber. The car flew through the air, landed slightly askew and skidded sideways into a bramble thicket. The engine stalled. I quickly restarted it and headed off in the direction taken by the aeroplane. I accelerated up the road – the car protesting with every yard of the uphill stretch – and emerged clear of the forest; the plane was ahead of us by only a hundred yards. I pressed the accelerator again and surged forwards. We turned right into another field and tore across the grass, gaining on the plane, which was still flying into the headwind.

“Emma!”

“What now?!”

“There’s a dam!”

It was true. To the left and right of us and not more than half a mile distant was the broad expanse of a dam, blocking our route. Pan was flying into Canada and there didn’t seem to be anything Graham or I could do about it.

“Take the wheel!” I yelled as we drew closer behind and beneath the plane. Graham eyed the approaching bank nervously, but took the wheel nonetheless. We were doing nearly seventy across the flat grassland and it wouldn’t be long before we passed the point of no return. I took careful aim with both hands and fired into the plane’s cockpit. It jinked and banked violently. For a second I thought I had hit the pilot but the plane quickly changed direction; it had merely gone into a dive to gain speed.

I swore out loud, stamped on the brake and pulled the wheel around. The car skittered on the grass and crashed sideways through the fence before sliding down the bank and coming to a stop at the water’s edge with a front wheel in the dam. I jumped out and fired at the retreating aircraft in a futile gesture until my gun was empty, half expecting Pan to turn about and make another pass at us, but he never did. The plane, with Pan, a forged Gainsborough and ten million dollars in fake notes, spluttered away into the distance.

 

After a minute or two, Graham and I climbed out and looked at the damaged car.

“A total write-off,” Graham murmured after making a last position report over the wireless. “It’s not gonna be long before Pan realises that the money we gave him is _not_ of the highest quality.

I stared at the aircraft, which was now little more than a dot on the horizon.

“Heading over the border?” Graham suggested.

“Probably,” I replied, wondering how we would ever get to Pan if he took refuge in Canada. Extradition agreements did exist but Canadian-American relations were not good and there was no chance that they would just hand him over. And even if the Mounties did manage to capture him, there was no death penalty in Canada. Which I knew meant Pan would be back at large in less than a year.

 _If_ they even caught him in the first place.

“Now what?” asked Graham.

“I don’t know,” I replied slowly, “but I think you might want to brush up on your fairy tales as soon as possible. I’ve got a feeling as soon as Pan finds out he’s been tricked, Jack’s gonna be the first one against the wall.”

The plane vanished over the mountains. All was quiet except for the gentle _lap-lap_ of the water. I sat down on the grass and shut my eyes, attempting to get a few moments of peace before we were thrown back into the maelstrom of QuangTech, Pan, fairy tales and all the rest. It was a calm moment – the eye of the hurricane. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was still thinking about Tamara Medlar. The news about her and Neal was both expected and unexpected at the same time. I mean, he could’ve mentioned it, but then, after a ten-year absence, he was hardly under any obligation to do so. I found myself wondering what it would be like to be a mom, and then wondering what it would be like never to know.

Graham joined me on the grass. He took off a shoe and emptied out some gravel. “Hey, that post I was talking about. The one in Ohio?”

“Yeah?”

“They confirmed the appointment this morning.”

“Great. When do you start?”

Graham’s cheek twitched. “I haven’t confirmed it yet.”

“Why not?”

“Have you ever been to Ohio?”

“Yeah, a long time ago,” I said, deliberately leaving out the fact that it had been after running away from a foster home in Pennsylvania.

“It’s beautiful out there.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“They’re offering me twice what I make now.”

“Sounds like a good deal.”

“And they said I could bring someone with me.”

“Really? Got anyone in mind?”

“You.”

I looked at him, and his urgent and hopeful expression said it all. I hadn’t thought of him as a permanent boss or partner. I supposed working with him might be like working under Briggs again. A workaholic who expected much the same from his charges.

“Wow. Uh, that’s a – that’s a very generous offer, Graham.”

“So you’ll, uh – you’ll think about it?”

I shrugged. “Right now I can’t think about much besides Pan. The first time we met he tried to kill me. And it’s only gotten worse since then. After what happened in Boston … he got into my head. I can’t sleep at night because he’s _there_ , leering at me in my dreams.”

Graham had had no such dreams, but then he hadn’t seen as much of Pan as I had. We both lapsed into silence and stayed that way for an hour, watching a trio of cows trundle down to the dam for a drink until the tow truck arrived.

 

The garage had said they would have been happier to scrap the bug, but I told them to get it back on the road _no matter what_ , as it still had important work to do. Meanwhile, I vented my frustrations on a toaster in my brother’s kitchen while rock music blared through the stereo. Well, half a toaster now. Most of its components lay on the counter and the floor, all in pieces.

I just needed to break something. Rather than have it be something of Granny’s or my mother’s, I had the tow truck driver drop me off at Jesse’s house. He saw my face and let me in without comment, leaving me alone except to put a bottle of Heineken’s on the counter. It was the one thing we understood about each other.

“Bloody hell,” I heard Gabi swear when she shut the stereo off. I hadn’t heard her come in, but that wasn’t a surprise. “I just got through fixing the waffle iron.”

“It was that or the microwave,” said Jesse from the living room, where he was stretched out on the sofa with another beer and watching _Mythbusters._ It was the episode where the crew knocked the crash dummy’s socks off by whacking it with a steel bar. “The toaster’s cheaper to replace.”

“Appliance abuse is a family trait, huh?” Gabi commented as she took the remains of the toaster from me and looked it over, seeing if it was possible to fix. Given the look of the screwdriver in my hand, I was going to say _no._ “What happened?”

“Your idiot brother,” I said simply. Gabi frowned at me.

“Be more specific. I’ve got three, and they’re all idiots.”

“Neal.”

“Ah.” Gabi nodded sympathetically. “So he told you about Tamara, eh?”

“No.”

She looked confused, then her mouth formed into a perfect ‘O’. “I see.”

“Do you like her?”

“You mean other than the fact that she’s a right minger who calls me ‘weird’?” Gabi scowled and shook her head. “She’s bloody _lovely,_ ” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

“You _are_ weird,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I said it; it certainly wasn’t in Tamara’s defence.

“Yes, but when _you_ say it, you’re just stating a fact,” Gabi replied.

Jesse, who had been listening in, shut off the TV and turned around on the sofa to face us with his elbows propped up on the back rest. “Why do you care, Emma?”

“I don’t care.”

“I think the toaster would say otherwise.”

“Look,” I said, slamming the screwdriver down on the kitchen table. “Neal and I ended things ten years ago. He’s perfectly free to marry whoever he wants. I don’t care that he’s engaged. I’m just frustrated about this case and the fact that it’s going nowhere and, yeah, he could’ve told me about it rather than letting me find out about it from _her_ , and over the phone.”

Neither one of them looked convinced in the slightest. I looked down at my hands, which were covered in grease.

“Do you mind if I use your shower?”

“Yeah, it’s just down the hall,” said Jesse, pointing.

I tried not to look as if I was running away from a conversation I didn’t want to have, but I doubted either of them was fooled. Unfortunately, Jesse and I were too similar in that regard, and Gabi was the smartest person I knew apart from her dad.

 

They had a combined tub and shower. The thought of a warm bath was too much to resist, so I filled up the tub and dropped in a hefty amount of bubblebath. I stretched out in the tub, took a swig from the beer I’d brought in with me, and tried not to think of anything. It actually worked, and I started to drift off to sleep in the warm pine-smelling waters until I was rudely startled by a knock at the door. It was Neal.

“Holy shit, Neal!” I exclaimed, hurriedly rearranging the bubbles. “Can’t a girl have a bath in peace?”

At least he had the decency to look as embarrassed as I felt. But then, he had walked into an occupied bathroom – what had he expected?

“Sorry, Emma.”

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s my sister. What are _you_ doing here?”

“It’s my brother. I meant, what are you doing in the _bathroom_?”

“Oh. Uh, Jesse … might’ve mentioned you were here.”

“Did he now. What do you want?”

He shifted uneasily. “I wanted to apologise. I, uh, heard you spoke to Tamara.”

“Yeah, I did. Are you seriously going to marry that witch?”

“She’s not a witch, Emma,” he replied with an exasperated sigh. “Look, I didn’t mean for Tamara to be a surprise, okay? I was gonna tell you myself but you kinda ran off the last time we were together.”

“Like I always do, right?”

He kept his face carefully blank. There was an awkward silence. I stared at the tap and waited for him to leave, but he sat down on the toilet seat instead.

“I’m getting on, Emma,” Neal said finally, fidgeting with his fingers. “I’ll be thirty-six in March and I don’t want to spend my life waiting for something that’s never gonna happen. I want love. I want kids.”

“And Tamara’s going to give you that?”

“Sure. She’s a great woman. Not you, of course, but she’s great; very …”

“Dependable?”

“Solid, maybe. Not exactly exciting, but reliable. Pretty, nice, good sense of humour. Doesn’t have too bad an attitude about the whole fairy-tale thing.”

“Do you love her?”

“Of course.”

“Then what’s there to talk about? What do you want from me?”

Neal hesitated. “I … I just wanted to know that I’m making the right choice.”

“You said you love her.”

“I do.”

“And she can give you the love and kids you want.”

“Yeah.”

“Then you should marry her.”

Neal hesitated again. “And that’s okay with you?”

I laughed half-heartedly. “Neal, you don’t need my permission. I’m your _ex_ , for God’s sake.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just … I wanted to ask if you think this could have all had some other outcome.”

I watched a bubble pop and resisted the urge to look at him.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I finally murmured. “What happened is what happened, and neither one of us can go back and change it. You need to marry her, Neal. You promised her and besides –” I thought quickly, “– I have a job in Ohio.”

“Really?” He frowned. “When did that happen?”

“This morning. Sheriff Graham got a detective posting that includes a partner, and he offered it to me.”

“And you’re gonna take it.”

“Yep.”

Another minute of awkward silence passed. Neal nodded, looking defeated, thanked me and promised to send me an invite to the wedding. Then he left. I stayed in the bath until I heard him say goodbye to Gabi and shut the outside door. When I came out, Gabi and Jesse were at the kitchen table putting the toaster back together. Neither of them looked up, but I caught them both sneak glances at me as I found my keys and shoes and made to leave. I knew those looks. It meant, “I wish you were my brother/sister-in-law."


	23. Jack is Reprieved

‘Love didn’t find me. Love hit me in the face with a wet fish, and when I still wouldn’t listen, it proceeded, in turn, to run me over as a racehorse would a gopher mound, then crush my soul in a million little pieces, and finally sweep them all up again the day Belle came back to me. I had spent those long centuries living only for the hope of one day seeing Baelfire again. I had forgotten how to live. She saw through the mask of the monster, and reminded me how to be human again.’

Robert Gold, _Fairy Tales in the Modern World: Rumplestiltskin_

 

“Rumple!”

“Belle!”

They met at the shores of the lake, next to the swath of daffodils that rocked gently in the warm breeze. The sun shone brightly, throwing a dappled light upon the grassy bank on which they found themselves. A little way down the water’s edge, an old man in a black cape was seating upon a stone, idly throwing pebbles into the lake. All about them the fresh smell of spring lay upon the land as Rumple and Belle ran and embraced each other like lovers separated too long. It might have been almost perfect, if not for the presence of Felix8, his face not yet healed, standing on the daffodils and keeping a careful eye on his charges. Worried about Rumplestiltskin’s commitment to the plan, Pan had allowed him back into _I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud_ to see his wife, and remind him of exactly what he stood to lose.

“I was so worried about you,” said Belle, near tears as she clung to her husband. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, stuck with that demon – what did he do to you?!”

Rumple looked down at his forearm, which bore a long and bloodied cut courtesy of Killian Jones’ hook. “It’s nothing, sweetheart. I got into a small tiff with our old friend, the captain.”

“Hook? He works for Pan now?” Belle gasped. “Why did he –”

“I burned it. The _English Fairy Tales_ manuscript.”

“ _What?!”_

“I said I –”

“No, I heard you.” Belle took a breath, fighting back the librarian in her that wanted to curse him to eternity in damnation for such a sin. “Why on earth would you do that? An original manuscript – it’s almost beyond value.”

Rumple winced and cradled his bloodied arm. It was not an action he had taken lightly, and one he’d known he would pay for. The least he could say was that Pan wouldn’t kill him. Not yet, anyway.

“Without the original manuscript,” he explained softly, “Pan can’t kill the characters. Not all iterations of them all at once, anyway. I told you that maniac ordered his men to kill Mr Elwood inside _Jack and the Beanstalk._ He turned up dead in Storybrooke. What would have made him stop there? And not just Jacobs’ variation – he’s got manuscripts from Perrault, Mother Goose, even the Grimm Brothers. I had to do something.”

“Rumple, the portal must only have a couple of jumps left in it by now,” Belle whispered so that Felix8 wouldn’t hear them.

“I know.”

“When he finds out that it’s not _you_ –”

“I _know_ ,” Rumple insisted. “I promise I’ll think of something. I just need more time.”

“Why is it this always the way things have to be for us?” asked Belle.

He smiled sadly and wiped a tear from her cheek, cradling her face fondly. Though age had greyed her hair and lined her face, she had never stopped being his Beauty. “I don’t know, sweetheart. But I promise we’ll work it out. We always do.”

Belle sobbed once more, then threw her arms around him again.

“On a lighter note,” Rumple asked when they broke apart, “how are you enjoying your foray into the world of the written word?”

She let out a little laugh. “I’m fine, although Mr Wordsworth over there seems to think that he’s God’s gift to women. He invited me to join him into a few of his unpublished works. A couple of flowery phrases and he thinks I’m his.”

“The bastard!” exclaimed Rumplestiltskin, looking over at the man sitting at the lake shore. “Who does he think he is –!”

“Rumple,” said Belle firmly, her tone instantly de-escalating her husband’s ire. She had no desire to see her septuagenarian husband and Wordsworth get into a duel over her – though it would have been quite the story at Granny’s Diner.

Rumple took a deep breath to calm himself down. “You said no, of course?”

“Of course I did.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “Don’t leave _Daffodils,_ or else I won’t know where to find you.”

“I promise.”

She took his hand and squeezed it gently, and together they looked out across the lake. There was no opposite shore, and the pebbles that Wordsworth flicked into the water popped back out after a moment or two and landed back on the foreshore. Aside from that, the countryside was near indistinguishable from reality.

“I’m proud of you, Rumple,” said Belle, standing on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. As she did, a shadow fell over them both.

“Time’s up,” said Felix8.

 

As Rumple told me later, Pan had been furious when he discovered that no-one had taken him seriously, but Rumple’s actions in destroying _English Fairy Tales_ simply made him laugh. As a man unused to being hoodwinked, he enjoyed the experience thoroughly. He even stopped Captain Hook from tearing Rumple limb from limb (mostly) and slapped him enthusiastically on the back.

“I must say I’m impressed, laddie,” said Pan with a smile. “I didn’t think you had it in you. Your act was both brave and ingenious. Brave, ingenious, but sadly self-defeating. I didn’t pick _Jack and the Beanstalk_ by chance, you know.”

“No?” retorted Rumple, not really listening. He was too busy watching Hook cautiously out of the corner of his eye, just in case the captain decided to take another swing at him. He wasn’t sure if he’d survive a second scuffle.

“No. I met Jack as a little boy in Hamelin. Quite the little shit. Even if they had paid the ransom I would have killed him anyway and enjoyed the experience tremendously.”

He stopped to smile at Rumple, and continued: “Your intervention has allowed Jack to continue his adventures and his family living their tedious little lives unperturbed.”

“I’m glad,” replied Rumple.

“Save your sentiments, boy, I haven’t finished. In view of your actions, I’ll have to find an alternative. A book which, unlike _English Fairy Tales,_ has genuine literary merits.”

“What are you talking about?”

Pan walked over to the bookshelves, stroking the spines lovingly, like an executioner would his axe just before lopping off some poor sod’s head.

“You know, it’s too bad that none of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts survive,” he commented with a sigh. “It would have been a delight to pay Hamlet a visit, and throttle his insufferably gloomy Danish neck. Or skipped into _Romeo and Juliet_ and stuffed out that stupid twerp. Ooh, _this_ is a possibility.” Practically skipping with excitement, Pan pulled out _Le avventure di Pinocchio_ – Carlo Collodi’s beloved children’s book, _The Adventures of Pinocchio._ “Another insufferable little shit. All that moralising about truth, selflessness and bravery.”

“You heartless monster,” Rumplestiltskin growled.

“Flattery will get you nowhere, laddie. In any case, you needn’t worry. _Pinocchio_ without Geppetto or Pinocchio would be a trifle lame, don’t you think? Nah, I think I’ll leave Signore Lorenzini’s work as it is. Perhaps Perrault would make a greater impact – oh, ho-ho, I do believe I’ve found the perfect story.”

Rumple’s eyes widened when he saw the title of the manuscript: _Kinder-und Hausmärchen._ The Grimm Brother’s _Children’s and Household Tales._

“No!”

“Let’s see,” Pan mused, completely ignoring him. “ _Rapunzel. Hansel and Gretel._ Met them – frankly, I think they did the world a favour in frying the Blind Witch. _Cinderella._ Hmm. _The Elves and the Shoemaker. Little Briar-Rose. Little Snow White …_ ”

Without thinking, Rumplestiltskin rushed to his feet without his cane and all of his weight on both legs. He couldn’t let Pan tear apart the _Grimm Brothers!_

Sadly, the pain in his bad ankle caught up to him, and he collapsed back onto the sofa even before Henry Jekyll had a chance to shove him down.

“Did I strike a nerve there, sonny boy?” asked Pan with a demonic grin. “Snow White. The bandit princess you spent so many years protecting from her stepmother, all for the purpose of her little brat one day breaking the curse you’d trick the queen into casting so you could find your son. _Imagine_ the repercussions …”

“Papa …” Rumplestiltskin gasped. “Please …”

Pan snapped the manuscript shut. “Felix?”

“Yessir!”

“Lock Rumple in his room for me, won’t you? I daresay we won’t have need of him for a while. Give him no water for two days and no food for five. That should be punishment enough for disposing of the manuscript.”

Felix8 nodded and forcibly dragged Rumplestiltskin out of the hotel’s old lounge, into the lobby and up the broad marble staircase. They were the only ones in the mouldering old hotel; the large front door was locked and bolted.

As they walked up the stairs, Rumplestiltskin stopped for a breather by a window, and used the time to look out to the city beyond. He had been to Quebec once before, with Belle and the children, shortly after reuniting with Bae in New York. The family trip to south-east Canada had been the only time they had together before Bae left to join the Union Army. His boy had always dreamt of being a hero …

Felix8 interrupted Rumple’s train of thought by jabbing him in the back with a shotgun. Rumple got the message and hauled himself up the next flight of stairs, whereupon they came to his cell – a windowless room with only the barest furniture. Pan had it converted from an old janitor’s closet. As he was locked in and left alone, Rumple’s thoughts turned again to his family. He thought of his boys, how they were coping, if Emma’s return to Storybrooke had made Bae change his mind at all about marrying Tamara, and whether Nicholas had remembered to call Mr Tiraboschi to repair the old clock they’d gotten in a few weeks ago. He thought of Gideon, and of Gabi, and finally of Belle, the image of her smiling face amongst the daffodils as clear in his mind as if he were still inside _I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud._ He had always thought she could be a bit of a flirt, even if it wasn’t flirting from her perspective, and Mr Wordsworth’s interest in her caused Rumple no small amount of jealous anxiety.


	24. Time Enough for Contemplation

‘I hadn’t thought that _Jack and the Beanstalk_ was a popular fairy-tale, but I was wrong. None of us expected the public outcry and media attention that his murder provoked. Mr Elwood’s autopsy was a matter of public record; his funeral was attented by no less than 50 Jacks and Jacquelines from all over the States, Canada, Great Britain and even one from South Africa, all PDRs who developed sudden and unexplainable memory loss of the identity of their fathers. Commander Weselton ordered us to stay quiet about the NCD involvement, but the news leaked out anyway.”

Roland Locksley, interview with the _Storybrooke Mirror_

 

Commander Oskar Weselton threw the newspaper on the desk in front of us. He paced around for a bit before collapsing heavily into his chair.

“I want to know who told the press,” he announced. George Spencer was leaning on the window frame and watching us all while smoking a rather small and foul-smelling Turkish cigar. The headline was unequivocal:

 _Beanstalk_ death: SpecOps blamed

It went on to outline specifically how ‘unnamed sources’ within Storybrooke SpecOps had intimated that a botched ransom payment had been the cause of Mr Elwood’s death. It was a complete turn of events, but the basic facts were correct. It had placed Weselton under a lot of pressure and caused him to overspend his precious budget by a phenomenal amount to try and discover Pan’s whereabouts. The spotter plane that Graham and I had pursued was found as a burned-out wreck on the Union side of the Allagash Wilderness. The briefcase full of counterfeit money was close by along with the ersatz Gainsborough. It hadn’t fooled Pan for a second. We were all convinced that he was in Canada now but even political intervention at the highest possible level had drawn a blank – the Canadian Home Secretary himself had sworn that they knew nothing of Pan’s whereabouts, but would inform us the moment he had a lead. It basically translated to – “We’ll conduct our own search and disposal without the help of useless Yankees”. With no jurisdiction on the Canadian side of the border, our searches had centred around the Waterways – to no avail.

“If the press found out, it wasn’t from us,” swore Graham. “We’ve got nothing to gain from press coverage and everything to lose.” He glanced over at Spencer, who shrugged.

“Don’t look at me,” said Spencer non-committally. “I’m just an observer here at the request of QuangTech.”

Weselton got up and paced the room. Graham, Roland and I watched him in silence. We felt sorry for him; he wasn’t a bad man, just a weak one. The whole affair stank of a bear trap, and if he wasn’t removed by the upper eschelon, then QuangTech would still just go and do the job themselves.

“Does anyone have any ideas?”

We all looked at him. We had a few, but none that could be said in front of Spencer. Since he was so willing to let Graham and I be killed that evening at Darling’s apartment, not one of us was willing to give QuangTech the light of day.

“Was Leigh Hamelin traced?”

“Nothing confirmed, but we did find a Royston Hamelin in Brooklyn. He’s a services accountant and was brought over with the curse. There’s absolutely no evidence of him or his family being involved in anything nefarious, though. And apparently his grandmother’s name was Delia.”

“Dead end,” muttered Weselton. “Anything else?”

Roland cleared his throat. “It looks like Felix7 may have been replaced. A feller named Daniel Williams went missing from Portland; the poor guy’s face was found in a rubbish bin on the third floor of the multistorey. We’ve circulated the morgue photos of Felix7. They should match the new Felix.”

“Are you sure Darling didn’t say anything except ‘Felix7’ before you killed him?” asked Weselton.

“Positive,” said Graham in his best lying voice.

We returned to the NCD office in a glum mood. Weselton’s removal might provoke a dangerous shakeup at Headquarters, and I had Rumple and Belle to think of. Just because Neal and I weren’t involved anymore didn’t mean I didn’t care for his parents – they had done a lot for me, and they weren’t bad people.

Roland dropped into his desk chair and opened up a much-thumbed copy of _English Fairy-Tales._ He and Cassandra had been reading it on a twenty-four-hour relay basis since Pan’s escape. Nothing seemed to have changed, which was perplexing. We were also working desperately on the one piece of information we had that SO-5 and QuangTech didn’t. While the name ‘Dr Louis Stevenson’ had provided a possible five hundred and eighty-three candidates registered in the Union, Confederacy and Canada (and a further three hundred with the search extended to Britain and Scotland), John Darling had made a reference to a Dr Jekyll before expiring and that name was now the subject of a rigorous search on SpecOps and police databases. A rigorous but _secretive_ search; that was what had taken the time.

“You think Cassandra found anything yet?” I asked as I hung my jacket on my chair and sat down.

“I bloody hope so,” said Roland with a sigh. “You know it could take months if we do it this way?”

“Yeah, I know,” I replied, swivelling from side to side in my chair. “What if we –”

I broke off in mid-sentence, a Post-It note stuck to my top desk drawer having just caught my attention. I peeled it off, then jumped up and grabbed my jacket.

“What’s the matter?” asked Roland.

“ _‘Meet me in the basement,’_ ” I read off Cassandra’s note. “ _‘I’ve found something.’_ ”

“That woman is bloody brilliant,” said Roland.

 

“What did you find?” I asked excitedly as Roland and I got to the bottom of the stairs leading to the basement, where Cassie was waiting for us. We’d dropped in on Graham to tell him we were getting lunch – I figured the reason Cassandra left a note rather than texting or calling was to keep it secret from anybody watching us, and Spencer was still around. Besides, all four of us being out of the office at once would have been a dead giveaway – we’d fill him in later.

Cassandra ushered us into the small, cramped office space, which smelt strongly of graveyard dirt and wet dog. Ruby wasn’t there, but I instantly got Cassandra’s logic. Nobody except Ruby ever came down to the basement, so it was unlikely we’d be overheard, and the security camera had been removed after the night guard almost had a heart attack from what he’d seen.

“So?” asked Roland.

“Well,” started Cassandra. “You know how the PDR activists have been trying to build a database of known fairy-tale characters in an effort to reunite people split apart by the curse? Well, I searched through it, and I think I have a lead.”

“How?” I said, pulling out the waste bin and tipping it heads-up so I could sit. “We’ve been over the database with a fine-toothed comb and didn’t find anything.”

“In the _Union_ database,” she clarified. “This is the English one.”

“That can’t be legal,” said Roland.

“Oh, it’s all public information,” Cassandra assured us. “But we are talking about a few hundred thousand people, and not all of them were famous enough to be the titular characters of a fairy-tale; there’s a ten-year backlog of information that the archivists are trying to sort through. Anyway, I gave up on the search for Louis Stevenson, and I’ve been trying to figure out who this ‘Leigh Hamelin’ is instead.”

“It’s a dead end,” I said. “The only other Hamelin we found was a Royston in Brooklyn, and that guy is no criminal.”

“There’s another possibility,” said Cassandra. “See, Hamelin was a port city in Gaul, a few miles south of Avonlea. Now, amongst other things that the archivists have tried to record is everybody’s town, city or at least their county of origin. Dumpty was the one who had the idea – it was meant to make it easier to find lost family and friends. So I ran a search for everyone with ‘Hamelin’ listed as their hometown in both the Union and the English databases, and found this guy.”

She pressed a button and a profile came up on the screen. There wasn’t much information, just a name, a brief biography and a blurry photograph of a man I didn’t recognise.

“Mr William Smee, imprisoned in Parkhurst Barracks in 1996 for fraud,” Cassandra summarised. “Which seems like nothing overly significant, except that in 1996 the resident doctor in Parkhurst was … a Doctor Henry Jekyll.”

Roland and I both sat up straighter.

“It gets better,” said Cassandra. “Smee had a cellmate named Felix Parker, who was arrested in 1992 for kidnapping a nine-year-old boy from a school playground. Adding to that, Jekyll was friends with a certain Humperdinck van Dumpty. They met when they were both guest lectures at Cambridge in 1985, struck up a friendship and in 1986, started the first PDR awareness campaigns.”

“Now there’s a name that fits,” I said.

“It’s quite interesting, actually.” Cassandra tapped on the keyboard again, bringing up Henry Jekyll’s profile. “According to most of the research I’ve done, Jekyll was actually something of a philanthropist. Not only was he a PDR activist, he did a lot of research into behavioural disorders and spoke out publicly against the shame associated with mental health. He had some sort of breakdown in 1994 after lecturing on the subject at the University of Warwick, and moved to Parkhurst in 1996. After that, it’s like he becomes a completely different person. He was implicated for the death of an inmate less than four months after taking the job, but nothing was ever proven and the whole affair was swept under the rug. Then in December ’96, he came under investigation by the English authorities for a side business he was running selling donor organs taken from the inmates. He was struck off for gross professional misconduct, awaiting trial. In an interview from March ’97, Humpty denied any knowledge of Jekyll’s nefarious activities and, I quote, felt ‘deep shame for ever being associated with such a monster’.”

“But if he is the Jekyll that Darling was talking about,” I said, the puzzle pieces starting to fall together, "then that proves that Pan had a direct link to Dumpty, even if his association with Jekyll had been over for twenty years."

“Only one problem with that – the record states that Jekyll died in July ’97, just a few weeks out from his trial,” said Cassandra. “He committed suicide. Swam into the sea after leaving a note and his body was never recovered.”

“That’s a faked death if I ever heard one,” I said, to which Cassandra grinned agreement.

“And even better – two weeks later, Smee was released on bail, paid by an anonymous donor. He more or less vanishes from the record after November ’97, but I found record of a ‘Bill Hamelin’ boarding the _HMS Clarence_ in April ’98, bound for Nova Scotia. But there’s no record of him disembarking; in fact, he even left his suitcase behind. Nobody claimed it for three months and the Canadian authorities had it destroyed.”

“Any leads on where he went?” asked Roland.

“Nothing yet, but I talked to Mum and she managed to get me Dr Jekyll’s personnel file from Parkhurst.” Cassandra showed as a fax and read out the pertinent points. “Henry Jekyll. Originally from ‘the Land of Victorian England’. Majored in chemistry at Cambridge University before switching to medicine. Struck off in 1997 for gross professional misconduct. He played the pianoforte, was a keen train-spotter, a Brother of the Most Worshipful Order of the Wombat and a founding member of the Earthcrossers.”

“Hmm,” I murmured, thinking. “Do you think this guy might continue to indulge himself in his old hobbies even if he was living under an assumed name?”

“What do you suggest, then?” asked Roland. “Wait for the next steam train extravaganza? Monitor every _single_ train station in America?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, the Wombats _never_ disclose membership.”

“I know that,” I said. “I was thinking more about one of us infiltrating the next Earthcrossers meeting.”

“The Earthcrossers?” said Roland with incredulity. “You’ve got to be bloody joking, Emma. Weird lunatics doing strange things privately on deserted hillsides? Do you know what you have to go through to be admitted to their exclusive club?”

“It’s mostly distinguished and respected professional people of mature years.” I smiled and cocked my head, examining Roland head-to-toe. “What do you think, Cassie?”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “I reckon a tweed jacket with swede patches, a dorky tie – preferably one with a constellation or a tartan pattern – some suspenders and a pair of glasses, definitely going to need some shoe polish and trim the scruff back a little –”

“No bloody way!” shouted Roland indignantly. “There is no way, I repeat, no way on God’s own earth that you are going to get me to pose as an Earthcrosser.”


	25. The Earthcrossers

‘An asteroid can be any size from a man’s fist to a mountain. They are the detritus of the solar system, the rubbish left over after the workmen have been and gone. Most of the asteroids around today occupy a space between Mars and Jupiter. There are millions of them, yet their combined mass is a fraction of the Earth’s. Every now and again an asteroid’s orbit coincides with that of the Earth’s. An _Earthcrosser._ To the Earthcrossers Society, the arrival of an asteroid at a planet is the return of a lost child, a prodigal son. It’s a matter of some consequences.’

Mr S.A. Orbiter, _The Earthcrossers_

 

Cadillac Mountain overlooks Acadia National Park in Hancock County, Maine. Between 1883 and 1893, the Green Mountain Cog Railway took visitors to the Green Mountain Hotel on the summit, which burnt down in 1895. The antiquity of the site, however, was not what attracted the Earthcrossers. They had gathered in almost every country of the globe, following the peculiar predictions of their calling an apparently random fashion. They always observed the same routine; name the site, do a very good deal with the owners for exclusivity, then move in the month before using either local security or junior members of the group to ensure that no infiltrators found their way in. It was perhaps due to this extreme secrecy that the militant astronomical group managed to keep what they did absolutely quiet. It seemed an almost perfect hiding place for Dr Jekyll, who co-devised the society in the mid-eighties with Samuel Orbiter, a notable television astronomer of the time.

Roland parked his car and walked nonchalantly up to two huge, gorilla-sized men who stood next to a parked Land Rover. Roland looked to the left and right. Every three hundred yards was a group of armed security men with walkie-talkies and dogs, keeping an eye out for trespassers. There was no way on Earth that anyone could slip by unseen. Roland had learnt a long time ago that the best way of entering anywhere you weren’t allowed to go was to walk in the front door as though you owned the place.

“Stop fidgeting,” Cassandra snapped in his earwig. “You’re fine.”

“My shirt itches,” Roland grumbled, tugging at the fraying tweed sleeves. “And I can’t see through these infernal glasses.”

“Just play the part, okay?”

Roland patted his pocket for his wallet and took out the photograph of Audrey and Oliver.

“This is why I do this,” he whispered to himself.

“Afternoon,” he said louder to the gorilla-man, who stepped into his way and put a huge hand on Roland’s shoulder.

“Good afternoon, sir. Fine day. May I see your pass?”

“Of course,” said Roland, fumbling in his wallet. He produced the pass inserted behind the worn plastic window. If the gorillas took it out and saw that it was a photocopy, then he’d been in a hell of a lot of trouble.

“I haven’t seen you around before, sir,” said one of the men suspiciously.

“No,” replied Roland evenly, “you’ll see from my card that I belong to the Nottinghamshire spiral arm.”

The gorillas both blinked in confusion.

“England,” Roland clarified.

The first man handed the wallet to his companion. “We’ve been having problems with infiltrators, isn’t that so, Mr Europa?”

The second man grunted and passed the wallet back to Roland. “Name?”

“I probably won’t be on the list,” said Roland slowly. “I’m a latecomer. I called Dr Jekyll last night.”

“I don’t know of any Dr Jekyll,” said the first, sucking in air through his teeth as he looked at Roland with narrowed, “but if you _are_ an Earthcrosser, you’ll have no problem telling me which of the planets has the highest density.”

Roland looked from one to the other and laughed. They laughed with him.

“Of course not!” He took a step forward but the smile on the men’s faces dropped. One of them put out another massive hand to stop him.

“Well?”

“This is preposterous,” said Roland indignantly, pushing his glasses up. The gorilla-men’s faces were fuzzy and he thought one of them had a mole on his cheek. “I’ve been an Earthcrosser for fifteen years and I’ve never had this sort of treatment before.”

“We don’t like infiltrators,” said the first man again. “They try to give us a bad name. Do you want to know what we do to bogus members? Now. Again, which of the planets has the highest density?”

Roland grunted, and the two men looked back at him menacingly.

“It’s Earth. The lowest is Saturn, okay? Assuming that you don’t count Pluto.”

The two security men were not convinced.

“Kindergarten stuff, mister. How long is a weekend on Jupiter?”

Two miles away in Cassandra’s car, she and I were frantically looking up the answer and transmitting it down the line to Roland’s earwig. The car was stuffed with all sorts of reference books on astronomy, with which we were double-checking Google’s answers; all that we could hope was that none of the questions would be too obscure.

“Nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes,” Cassandra relayed to Roland.

“A bit less than twenty hours,” said Roland to the two men.

“Orbital velocity of Mercury?”

“Would that be aphelion or perihelion?”

“Don’t get smart, pal. Average will do.”

“Let me seen now. Add the two together and – oh, wow. Is that a golden chaffinch?”

The two men didn’t turn to look.

“Uh, it’s 106,000 miles per hour.”

“Uranus’ moons?”

“Uranus?” said Roland, stalling for time. “Don’t you think it’s amusing that they changed the pronunciation?”

“The moons, sir.”

“Right. Oberon, Titania, Umbriel –”

“Hold it! A _real_ Earthcrosser would have logged the closest moon first!”

Roland sighed as Cassandra quickly reversed the order over the airwaves.

“Fine. Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Puck, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.”

The men looked at Roland, nodded and then stepped aside to let him pass, their manner changed abruptly to acute politeness.

“Sorry about that, sir, but as I’m sure you know, there are a lot of people who would like to see us stopped. Sure you understand.”

“Of course. And may I congratulate you on your thoroughness, gents? Anyway, good-day.”

As Roland walked between them, they stopped him once more.

“Aren’t you forgetting something, sir?”

Roland turned. I had wondered whether he’d be asked for some sort of password, and if that was what they wanted, then we were sunk. He decided to let them lead the situation.

“Leave it in the car, sir?” asked the first man after a pause. “Here, borrow mine.”

The security man reached inside his jacket and pulled out, not a gun as Roland had expected, but a baseball catcher’s glove. He smiled and handed it over.

“Don’t think I’ll make it up there today.”

Roland slapped his own forehead with the ball of his hand. “Mind like a string bag. I tell you, if part of my morning routine was to screw my head on I’d leave home without it. Imagine, coming to an Earthcrossers meet and forgetting my catcher’s glove!”

They laughed with him dutifully; then the first guard said, “Have a good time, sir. Earthstrike is at 14:32.”

He thanked them both and hopped into the waiting Land Rover before they changed their minds. He looked at the catcher’s glove uneasily. What on earth were they up to?

The Land Rover dropped him at the start of the paved hiking track. He could see about fifty people milling about, all wearing steel helmets and catcher’s gloves. A large tent had been set up at the base of the track. It bristled with aerials and a large satellite dish. Farther up the mountain was a radar scanner that revolved slowly. He had expected to see a large telescope or something, but no such apparatus had been set up.

“Name?”

Roland turned to see a small man staring up at him. He had a clipboard and wore a steel helmet with the chin-strap undone, and seemed to be taking full advantage of his limited authority.

So Roland attempted a bluff.

“That’s me there,” he said, pointing to a name at the bottom of the list.

“Mr Continued Overleaf, are you?”

“Above that.”

“Mrs Trotswell?”

“Oh, er, no. Sorry. Damned glasses, been meaning to get them fixed,” said Roland hurriedly, taking his glasses off and pretending to clean them on his jacket. “Name’s Ceres. Dr Augustus Ceres?”

The small man consulted his list carefully, running a steel ballpoint pen down the column of names.

“No-one of that name on here,” he said, looking at Roland with suspicion.

“I’m from Nottinghamshire,” Roland explained. “Late entry. I don’t suppose the news filtered through. But Dr Jekyll said I could drop in anytime.”

The man jumped.

“Jekyll? I’m sorry, sir, you must mean Dr Cassiopeia. No-one by the name Jekyll here.” He winked and smiled broadly. “Okay, now,” he added, consulting his list and looking around the mount, “we’re a bit thin on the outer perimeter. You can take station B3. Do you have a glove? Good. What about a helmet? Never mind; here, take mine. I’ll get another one from stores. Earthstrike at 14:32. Good-day.”

Roland took the helmet, smiled politely and trotted off in the direction that the small man had indicated.

“Hear that, Ems?” he whispered down the line. “Dr Cassiopeia.”

“I heard,” I replied. “Looking him up right now.”

Cassandra was already searching the web while on the phone with Ruby, who was waiting back at the office for just such a call.

Roland took his father’s pipe from his pocket and filled it, trying to look every bit the stuffy academic he was meant to be playing. He was walking towards station B3 when a man in a Barbour jacket nearly marched straight into him. Roland recognised Dr Jekyll’s face from the mugshot immediately. He was about twenty years older, but it was definitely him. Roland raised his hat, apologised and moved on.

“Wait!” yelled Jekyll. Roland turned. Jekyll raised an eyebrow and studied him with scrutiny. “Haven’t I seen your face somewhere else?”

“Nope, it’s always been right here on the front of my head,” Roland joked, attempting to make light of the situation. Jekyll simply stared at him with a blank expression as Roland carried on filling the pipe.

“I’ve seen you somewhere before,” continued Jekyll, but Roland wasn’t so easily shaken.

“I don’t think so, sir,” he said, offering his hand. “Dr Ceres. Nottinghamshire spiral arm.”

“Nottinghamshire, eh?” said Jekyll. “Glad to see another Englishman made it to the meet. I’m from London Town, myself. I don’t suppose you know my good friend and colleague, Professor Barnes, from Loughborough University?”

“Never heard of him,” Roland announced with a small shake of his head.

Jekyll smiled and looked at his watch. “Earthstrike in seven minutes, Dr Ceres. Perhaps you’d better take your station.”

“I shall. Lovely to meet you.”

Roland lit the pipe, took a puff, tried not to choke and then nodded jovially before heading off to find his station. He was aware of Jekyll’s eyes on his back the whole way. Eventually, he found a stake in the ground marked B3, and he stood there feeling slightly stupid. And a bit sick. He coughed and took the pipe out of his mouth. How the hell did his father smoke these things?

Discarding the charred tobacco, he looked around the mount, still feeling completely lost. All of the legitimate Earthcrossers had donned their helmets and were scanning the sky to the west. Roland looked around and caught the eye of a pretty-looking brunette woman a few years his senior, standing a half-dozen paces away at station B2.

“Hello!” he said cheerfully, tipping his helmet.

The woman fluttered her eyelashes demurely and gave him a smile. “Hello to you! All well?”

“Top hole!” replied Roland elegantly, then he added quickly; “Actually, I’m a bit nervous. It’s my first time.”

She gave him a look and waved her catcher’s glove. “Nothing to it, love. Just make sure to catch away from the body and keep your eyes sharp. We may get a lot or none at all, and if you _do_ catch one, be sure to put it down on the grass straight away. After decelerating through the atmosphere, they tend to be a bit hot.”

Roland stared at her.

“Wait – you mean, we’re here to _catch_ meteors?”

The lady laughed deliciously.

“No, no, silly! They’re called _meteorites._ Meteors are the things that burn up in the atmosphere. You know, I’ve been to seventeen of these suspected Earthstrikes since ’04. I nearly caught one in Gibraltar in 2013. Of course,” she added more slowly, “that was when dear George was still alive.”

She caught his eye and smiled. Roland smiled back. She carried on:

“If we witness an Earthstrike today, it’ll be the first predicted strike in North America to be successful. Imagine actually catching a meteorite! The rubble made during the creation of the universe over four and a half billion years ago! It’s like a lost child finally coming home!”

“Very … poetic,” Roland responded slowly as I started to talk in his ear by way of the wire.

“There’s no-one listed anywhere by the name of Dr Cassiopeia,” I told him urgently. “For God’s sake, don’t let him out of your sight!”

“I won’t,” replied Roland, looking around for Jekyll.

“Pardon?” asked the woman at B2, who had been sizing him up and not looking at the sky at all.

“I won’t, er, drop one if I catch it. Not straight away, anyway.”

Then the Tannoy announced the Earthstrike in two minutes. There was a murmur from the expectant crowd.

“Good luck!” said the lady, giving him a wink before turning her face to the cloudless sky.

Then there was a voice from close behind Roland.

“I _do_ remember you.”

He swallowed before turning to see the very unwelcome face of Dr Jekyll staring at him. A little farther on stood a burly security guard, hand at the ready in his breast pocket.

“You’re Robin Hood’s boy, aren’t you? Roland Locksley. SpecOps, Nursery Crime, Storybrooke division. Am I right?”

“No, my name’s definitely Dr Augustus Ceres, sir, from Nottinghamshire.” Roland chuckled nervously and then added, “What kind of name is Locksley?”

Jekyll beckoned to the henchman, who advanced on Roland while drawing his automatic. He looked like the sort of person who was itching to use it.

“I’m sorry, old boy,” said Jekyll with uncharacteristic kindness, “but that’s really not good enough. If you _are_ Locksley, then you’re clearly meddling. If, however, you do turn out to be Dr Ceres from Nottingham, then you have my sincerest apologies.”

“Now wait just a second –” began Roland, but Jekyll interrupted.

“I’ll let your family know where to find the body. Shoot him.”

The henchman smiled, his finger tightening on th trigger. Roland was preparing to duck when a high-pitched scream filled the air and a fortuitous incoming meteorite shattered on the guard’s helmet. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes. The gun went off and put a neat hole in Roland’s baseball glove.

Suddenly, the air was full of red-hot meteorites screaming to Earth in a localised shower. The assembled Earthcrossers were thrown into confusion by the sudden violence and couldn’t make up their minds whether to avoid the meteorites or try to catch them. Jekyll fumbled in his jacket pocket for his own pistol when somebody yelled, “ _Yours!_ ” close by. They both turned, but it was Roland who caught the small clump of rock. It was about the size of a softball and still glowing red-hot; he tossed it to Jekyll, who instinctively caught it. Sadly, he did not have a catcher’s glove. There was a hiss and a yelp as he dropped it, then a cry of pain as Roland took the opportunity to thump him on the jaw. Jekyll went down and Roland jumped on the dropped gun. He thrust it against Jekyll’s neck, dragged him to his feet and marched him off the mount, throwing the fake glasses aside as he did.

“It is Locksley, isn’t it?” asked Jekyll.

“Yup. NCD, SO-26 and you’re under arrest, Dr Jekyll.”


	26. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll

“My chief interest in all the work that I have conducted over the past forty or so years has been concerned with the _elasticity_ of the mind. One tends to think only of substances such as rubber in this category but almost anything that one can think of is capable of being bent and stretched. I include, of course, consciousness, personality and reality …”

Doctor Henry Jekyll, while at Warwick University

 

Roland, Cassandra and I got Jekyll as far as Interview Room 2 before Spencer realised who we had arrested. Roland had barely asked the doctor to confirm his name before the interview room door burst open. It was Spencer, flanked by two SO-9 operatives. None of them looked as if they had a sense of humour.

“My prisoner, Locksley.”

“ _My_ prisoner, Mr Spencer, I should think,” replied Roland firmly. “ _My_ collar, _my_ jurisdiction; and _I_ will be interviewing Dr Jekyll about the kidnappings, thank you.”

George Spencer narrowed his eyes and looked back at Commander Weselton, who was standing behind him looking sheepish. Behind them was Graham, looking at me with an expression of confusion. We hadn’t told him about the Earthcrosser meeting, too worried it would get back to Spencer. I felt guilty.

Then the commander cleared his throat, and I had to swallow the feeling.

“I’m sorry to say this, Roland, but QuangTech Corporations and their representative have been granted jurisdiction over SO-26 and SO-9 in Storybrooke. Withholding material from Acting SpecOps Commander Spencer may result in criminal proceedings for concealment of vital information pertinent to an ongoing inquiry. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means Spencer does what he bloody well pleases,” Roland snapped.

“No need for the language, Mr Locksley,” said Spencer with fake fatherliness. “You three are in hot enough water already, having investigated this matter without the authority of your superior officers.”

“What –”

“Actually, sir, that last part isn’t true,” said Graham suddenly. “I was informed of Operatives Locksley, Cole and Swan’s actions, but we were required to act quickly on an anonymous tip and so didn’t have time to complete the paperwork.”

Everyone in the room blanked, except for the SO-9 operatives, who were already as blank as was possible for a human being. George Spencer narrowed his eyes again.

“You’re going to stick to that story, Sheriff Humbert?”

“I am, sir.”

Spencer grunted.

When he wasn’t looking, I glanced over his shoulder to Graham and mouthed the words, _Thank you._

 _You owe me,_ he mouthed in response.

“Mr Locksley, I am ordering you to reliquish your prisoner. QuangTech can handle the investigation from here.”

Roland looked at Spencer hotly, then pushed his way out of the interview room. Cassandra slowly went after him.

“Sheriff, Miss Swan, if you’d be so kind –”

“I’d like to stay,” I requested.

“Not a chance,” said Spencer. “An SO-26 security clearance is _not_ permissible.”

“Well, I suppose it’s a good thing I still hold an SO-5 badge, then,” I retorted.

Spencer glared at me, but said nothing more. Graham was ordered out and the two SO-9 operatives stood on either side of the door; Spencer and Weselton sat down at the table behind which Jekyll non-chalantly sipped from a glass of water. I leant against the wall and impassively watched the proceedings.

“He’ll get me out, you know,” Jekyll said slowly as he smiled a rare smile.

“I don’t think so,” said Spencer. “Storybrooke Sheriff’s Station is currently surrounded by more SO-9 operatives and SWAT men than you could count in a month. Do you really think Pan values you enough to face down _that_?”

The smile dropped from Jekyll’s lips.

“SO-9 is the finest antiterrorist squad on the planet,” Spencer continued. “We’ll get him, I assure you. It’s merely a question of when. And if you help us, things might not look so bad in court for you.”

Jekyll laughed. “Right. So I might get life imprisonment as opposed to the hangman, King George?”

“It’s better than the alternative. _Believe me,_ ” said Spencer with a snarl.

Jekyll leant back in his chair and shook his head. “Nah. If your SO-9 operatives are the best on the planet, then how is it that a scruffy NCD bookworm was the one to figure out how to arrest me?”

George Spencer couldn’t seem to think of an answer to that. Jekyll turned to me.

“And if QuangTech is so shit hot, why is this young lass the only one who has even come _close_ to capturing Peter Pan?”

“I got lucky,” I replied. “Why hasn’t Jack been killed? It’s not like Pan to make idle threats.”

“Not at all, Miss Swan. Not at all.”

“Answer the question, Jekyll,” said Spencer pointedly. “I can make things _very_ uncomfortable for you.”

Jekyll smiled at him. “Not half as uncomfortable as Pan could, Georgie-boy. He lists slow murder, torture and flower arranging as his hobbies in _Which Criminal._ ”

“Do you want to do some serious time?” asked Weselton, who wasn’t going to be left out of the interview. “The way I see it, you’re looking at triple to quintuple life. Or, you could cooperate and walk free in a couple of minutes. What’s it to be?”

“Do what you like, officers. You’ll get nothing out of me. No matter what, Pan _will_ get me out.”

Jekyll folded his arms and leant back in the chair. There was a pause. Spencer stood up and switched off the tape recorder. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it across the video camera in the corner of the interview room. Weselton and I looked at one another nervously. Jekyll watched the proceedings but didn’t seem unduly alarmed.

“Let’s try it again,” said Spencer, pulling out his automatic and pointing it at Jekyll. “Where is Pan?”

Jekyll just grinned. “You can kill me now or Pan kills me later when he finds out I’ve talked. I’m dead either way and your methods are probably a great deal less painful than Pan’s. I’ve seen him at work. You wouldn’t believe what he is capable of.”

“I would,” I said slowly.

Spencer released the safety on his automatic. “I’ll count to three.”

“I can’t tell you –!”

“One.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“Two.”

I took my cue. “We can offer you protective custody.”

“From _him_?” Jekyll exclaimed. “Are you _completely_ insane?”

“Three!”

Jekyll closed his eyes and started to shake. Spencer lowered the gun. This wasn’t going to work. Suddenly, I had a thought.

“He doesn’t have the manuscript anymore, does he?”

Jekyll opened one eye and looked at me. It was the sign I’d been hoping for.

“Rumplestiltskin destroyed it, didn’t he?” I continued, reasoning as my once-future-father-in-law might have – and apparently did.

“Is that what happened?” Spencer demanded. Jekyll said nothing.

“He’ll be looking for an alternative,” I concluded.

“There must be thousands of original manuscripts out there,” murmured Weselton. “We can’t cover them all. Which one is he after?”

“I can’t tell you,” stammered Jekyll, his resolve beginning to leave him. “He’d kill me.”

“He’ll kill you when he finds out you told us that Rumplestiltskin destroyed the manuscript,” I said evenly.

“But I didn’t –!”

“He won’t care about the details. We can protect you, Henry, but we need to capture Pan. Where is he?”

Jekyll looked at us one by one. “Protective custody?” he stammered through forced laughter. “It’d take a small army.”

“I can supply that,” asserted Spencer, using the truth with an economy for which he had become famous – both here and in the Enchanted Forest. “QuangTech Corporations is prepared to be generous in this matter.”

Jekyll swallowed. “Okay … I’ll – I’ll tell you.”

He shivered and wiped his brow, which had suddenly started to glisten.

“Isn’t it a bit hot in here?” he asked.

“No,” said Spencer. “Where is Pan?”

“Well, he’s at … the …”

He suddenly stopped talking. His face contorted with fear as a violent spasm hit him and he cried out in agony.

“Tell us now!” shouted Spencer, overturning the table in his hurry to grab the stricken man’s lapels.

“Tec-umseh–!” he screamed. “He’s at –”

“Tell us more!” roared Spencer. “There must be a thousand Techumsehs!”

“Guess!” cried Jekyll. “Gweuess … _ahhh!_ ”

“I’ll not play your games!” yelled Spencer, shaking the man vigorously. “Tell me or I’ll kill you with my bare hands right now!”

But Jekyll was beyond rational thought or Spencer’s threats. He squirmed and fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

“Medic!” I shouted, dropping to the floor next to the convulsing Jekyll, whose open mouth screamed a silent scream as his eyes rolled up into his head. The smell of scorched clothes reached my nostrils. I jumped back as a bright orange flame shot out of Jekyll’s back. It ignited the rest of him within seconds and we all had to beat a hasty retreat as the intense heat reduced Jekyll to ash in less than ten minutes.

“Goddamn it!” spat Spencer when the acrid smoke had cleared. “What the hell was that?”

“Pan,” I murmured, slowly walking back inside the interrogation room. All that remained of Jekyll was a heap of cinders on the floor. There wouldn’t even be enough to identify him. “Some sort of built-in safety device. As soon as Jekyll starts to blab … _whoosh,_ up he goes. Very neat.”

“You sound almost as if you respect the man, Miss Swan,” observed Weselton.

“I can’t help it. Like the shark, Pan has evolved into the almost perfect predator. I’ve never hunted big game and don’t have any plans to start, but I can understand the appeal. The first thing,” I said, kicking the smoking pile of ash that had recently been Dr Jekyll, “would be to treble the guards on any places where original manuscripts are held. After that we want to start looking at _anywhere_ called Tecumseh.”

“I’ll get right onto it,” said Weselton, who had been looking for a reason to leave for quite some time.

Spencer and I were left looking at one another.

“It seems that you and I are on the same side, Miss Swan.”

“Sadly,” I replied disdainfully. “You want the portal. I want to protect my friends and family. I want Neal and Gold kids to have their parents back safely. Pan has to be destroyed before either of us gets what we want. Until then, we’ll work together.”

“A useful and happy union,” murmured Spencer, who clearly had anything but happiness on his mind.

I pressed a finger to his tie. “Understand this, Mr Spencer. Or King George, whatever you prefer. You may have might in your back pocket but I have right in mine. Believe me when I say I will do anything to protect my family. Do you understand?”

Spencer looked at me coldly.

“Don’t try to threaten me, Miss Swan. I could have you posted to the remotest police station in the middle of Utah before you can say ‘Mother Goose’. Remember that. You’re here because you’re good at what you do. Same reason as me. We are more alike than you think. Good-day, Miss Swan.”

 

A quick search revealed eighty-four towns and hamlets in Canada named Tecumseh. There were twice as many streets and the same number again of hotels, clubs and associations. It wasn’t surprising there were so many; Tecumseh was a Shawnee chief who fought on the side of the redcoats during the War of 1812 – he became a figurehead of the First Nations during the struggle for independence from the British and the US. Even if QuangTech _could_ infiltrate Canada, they wouldn’t know which Tecumseh to start with. Clearly, this was going to take some time.

Tired, I left to go home. I picked up my car from the garage, where they had managed to replace the front axle, shoehorn in a new engine and repair the bullet holes, some of which had come dangerously close. I rolled up at Granny’s as a Clipper-class airship droned slowly overhead. Dusk was just settling and the navigation lights on either side of the huge airship blinked languidly in the evening sky. It was an elegant sight, the ten propellers beating the air with a rhythmic hum; during the day, an airship could eclipse the sun. I stepped inside the B&B. The Milton conference was over and Liz welcomed me now as a friend rather than as a guest.

“Good evening, Miss Swan. All well?”

“Not really. But thanks for asking.”

“Can I get you anything?”

I paused for a moment. “Has, er, Mr Cassidy called?”

“No. Were you expecting him to?”

“No, not really. If he calls, I’ll be in my room. If you can’t find me, can you ask him to call again in half an hour?”

“Why don’t you just call him?”

“Oh, God; is it that obvious?”

Liz nodded.

“He’s getting married,” I said.

“But not to you?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Me too. Has anyone ever asked you to marry them?”

“Sure.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: ‘Ask me again when you get out’.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

 

I went up to my room, turned on the lights, and then turned them off again. I needed a drink. If I remembered correctly, there was a bar not far from Granny’s called the _Rabbit Hole._ It wasn’t exactly the most … upscale establishment, but in my condition, it was exactly what I needed.

“Good evening, miss,” said the barman in the Rabbit Hole. “What’ll it be?”

“Gin and tonic, please. A double.”

He smiled and turned to the optics. “You’re the lass who’s taken old Jim Crommety’s post, aren’t ya? Queen Snow’s heir?”

“News sure does travel fast,” I said.

“Hard to avoid in Storybrooke.”

I took my drink and said nothing.

“I trained to be a LiteraTech,” he said wistfully. “Made it all the way to cadetship, too.”

“What happened?”

“My girlfriend was a militant Marlovian. She converted some Will-Speak machines to quote from _Tamburlaine_ and I was implicated when she was arrested. And that was that. Not even the military would take me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jem.”

“Emma.”

We shook hands.

“I can only speak from experience, Ben, but I’ve been in the military _and_ Spec-Ops and you should be thanking your girlfriend.”

“I do,” hasted Jem. “Every day. We’re married now and have two kids. I do this bar job in the evenings and help run the Storybrooke branch of the Kit Marlowe society during the day. We’ve got nearly four hundred members. Not bad for an Elizabethan forger, murderer, gambler and atheist.”

“You know, some people say he might have written the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare.”

Jem was taken aback. He was suspicious too.

“I’m not sure I should be discussing this with a cop.”

“There’s no law against discussion, Jem. Besides, I’m NCD, not a LiteraTech. Or the thought police.”

“No, that’s SO-2, isn’t it?”

“So about Marlowe –?”

Jem looked around and lowered his voice. “Alright. I think Marlowe _could_ have written the plays. He was undoubtedly a brilliant playwright, as _Faust, Tamburlaine_ and _Edward II_ would attest. He was the only person of his age who could’ve actually done it. Forget Bacon and Oxford; Marlowe has to be the odds-on favourite.”

“But Marlowe was murdered in 1593,” I said. “Most of the plays were written _after_ that.”

Jem beckoned me closer. “Sure. _If_ he died in the bar fight that day.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s possible his death was faked.”

“Why?”

Jem took a deep breath. This was a subject he knew a thing or two about. “Remember that Elizabeth was a Protestant queen. Anything like atheism or papism would deny the authority of the Protestant Church and the Queen as the head.”

“Treason,” I murmured. “A capital offence.”

“Exactly. In April 1593, the Privy Council arrested a man named Thomas Kyd in connection with some anti-government pamphleteering. When his rooms were searched they revealed some atheistic writings.”

“So?”

“Kyd fingured Marlowe. Said Marlowe had written them two years before when they were rooming together. Marlowe was arrested and questioned on May eighteenth, 1593. He was freed on bail so presumably there wasn’t enough evidence to commit him for trial.”

“What about his friendship with Walsingham?”

“I’m getting to that. Walsingham had an influential position within the secret service; they had known each other for a number of years. With more evidence arriving daily against Marlowe, his arrest seemed inevitable. But on the morning of May thirtieth, Marlowe is killed in a bar brawl, apparently over an unpaid bill.”

“How convenient.”

“How indeed. It’s my belief that Walsingham faked his friend’s death. The three men in the tavern were all in his pay. He bribed the coroner and Marlowe set up Shakespeare as the front man. Will, an impoverished actor who knew Marlowe from his early days at the Shoreditch theatre, probably leaped at the chance to make some money. His career seems to have taken off just as Marlowe’s ended.”

“It’s an interesting theory, certainly. But wasn’t _Venus and Adonis_ published a couple of months before Marlowe’s death? Earlier even than Kyd’s arrest?”

Jem coughed. “Good point. All I can say is that the plot must’ve been hatched somewhat ahead of time, or that the records have been muddled.”

He paused for a moment, looked about and lowered his voice further.

“Don’t tell the other Marlovians, but there is something else that points away from a faked death.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Marlowe was killed within the jurisdiction of the Queen’s coroner. There were sixteen jurors to view the _supposedly_ switched body, and it’s unlikely that the coroner could’ve been bribed. If I had been Walsingham, I would’ve had Marlowe’s death faked in the boonies where coroners were more easily bought. Or had the body disfigured in some way to make identification impossible.”

“What are you saying?”

“That an equally probable theory is that Walsingham _himself_ had Marlowe killed to stop him from talking. Men say anything when tortured, and it’s likely that Marlowe had all sorts of dirt on Walsingham.”

“So what then?” I asked. “How do you account for the lack of any firm evidence regarding Shakespeare’s life, his curious double existence, and the fact that no-one seemed to know about his literary work in Stratford?”

Jem shrugged. “I dunno, Emma. Without Marlowe there isn’t anybody in Elizabethan London even _able_ to write the plays.”

“Any theories?”

“I wish I had one. But the Elizabethans were a funny lot. Court intrigue, the secret service …”

“The more things change –”

“My point entirely. Cheers.”

We clinked glasses and Jem wandered off to serve another customer. I played the piano for half an hour before going back to Granny’s. I checked with Liz but Neal hadn’t called.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys, I'm slowly getting back into the swing of writing now that term's almost over. However, expect updates to come at odd intervals for a little while yet. Thank you so much to everyone who's stuck with me!

**Author's Note:**

> This will more or less follow the plot of Jasper Fforde's 'The Eyre Affair' with minimal surprises


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